In this interview, Dan Kaminski, Professor of criminology at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, warns against the possible neutralisation of human rights. A utilitarian vision of those rights, which would serve a rehabilitative objective and a managerial approach of the prison administration, would consist of making the detainee responsible for creating the conditions for their own reintegration inside the prison itself. For the criminologist, “freedom must remain the mooring point for the whole policy of the structuring of the deprivation of liberty” and it is this approach that must guide efforts to transform prisons.
Issues at stake in the recognition of prisoners’ rights
