“Prison doesn’t stop them” Orchestrating criminal acts from behind bars

This article is about crime entrepreneurs that manage to organize criminal acts in the outside world, while being imprisoned. An examination of police intelligence on 13 cases, the Dutch penitentiary law, visits to two prisons and interviews with prison and law enforcement staff leads to the conclusion that for criminal leaders, whose most important tool for committing crimes is communication, there are a lot of possibilities, and little thresholds, for managing their criminal organisation from prison. The paradigms of reintegration of criminals and internal security in prison dominate the design of Dutch prison regimes. As a result, there are many opportunities for prisoners to communicate with the world outside. The findings of the case study are set against the theoretical background of the routine activity approach (R.A.T.). This theory provides a suitable conceptual framework to explain the forms of criminal behaviour found in the case study and it invites giving recommendations for situational crime prevention. An important notion for understanding the problem of crime that is organized from behind bars, that applying R.A.T. led to, is the physical distance between the ??motivated offender?? and his ??target??. In other words, the offender is imprisoned and his target is somewhere outside. This means that the guardians that keep an eye on the intellectual offender are others than the guardians that observe the actual offender and the target. For detecting crime organized from prison, a good monitoring of communication of the prisoner and his potential helpers and sufficient exchange of information between the different guardians is essential. Possible preventive measurements can be found in the reduction of communication channels.