Good afternoon.
There's a story today about a man who's been stealing sandwiches in Brussels Airport. He's homeless, is basically living there, and was pilfering them to feed himself. The prosecutor is asking he be given a one-year prison sentence.
Fine, you might say. Crimes need to be punished, and part of prevention is demonstrating to the wider public that there are consequences to your actions if you break the law. It's part of the social contract we all live by, and we generally agree that punishment should be proportionate to the crimes committed, which by a process of laws we work out over time.
How then, do you explain the Belgian justice system? Almost on a daily basis, we in The Brussels Times newsroom read the newswires of court cases for heinous crimes - more often than not of a serious sexual nature, and all too often involving minors - where the culprit is convicted and given an extremely lenient sentence, or even a suspended one or community service. Some of them make headlines, but many just go by unnoticed.
It's not that these people are found not guilty and are free to go. Rather they are found guilty, but told they shouldn't do it again, and to behave themselves in the future.
How is this possible? Is it that these crimes are not considered serious? Is there an extreme institutional belief that "everyone deserves a second chance"? Or are judges completely out of touch?
Countless studies by forensic psychologists show that there is a slippery slope when it comes to sexual offenders. Often they start off exposing themselves in public or engaging in voyeuristic behaviour, but this can rapidly and very predictably develop into sexual assaults, rapes and even sexually motivated killings - and they don't stop until they are caught and locked up.
Because of this, it is considered imperative to deal with the earliest signs of this type of behaviour severely and to remove these people from society, to try to treat them and rehabilitate them if possible so that they are no longer a danger to others.
Letting convicted sexual offenders out with a warning is both a danger to the public and an insult to the victims.
Yes, Belgium's justice system in is chaos and disarray, as evidenced by those working in it only this week. And we know the prisons are bursting at the seams.
But if the way of dealing with that is to send fewer criminals to jail, then why don't we at least start with those who steal a few tuna baguettes from an airport shop to feed themselves and work our way up from there?
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