"They have shut half their prisons not because people are less naughty in Holland," he told Channel 4. "It's because they have a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their children bedtime stories, and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again. A custodial sentence is not always the right thing."
But in the Netherlands, those comments evoked surprise in some quarters. The country has experienced an escalation in drug-related crime and has a new right-wing government keen to be seen as hard on law and order.
Overall crime dropped in the past decade but figures such as the Rotterdam mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, are sounding the alarm about a wave of violent, drugrelated criminality.
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