What Belgium Knows That We Don’t

This essay began with a stranger in Belgium, ten handwritten pages, and a conversation that stayed with me. It became a reflection on prison, rehabilitation, and the cost of what we call justice.

A few weeks ago, a social worker in Europe found me on Instagram. She’d been watching videos about American prisons and wanted to go deeper. So she did her own research. She compared Belgium and the United States, wrote it all out by hand — ten pages, front and back — and then reached out and asked if we could talk.

Her name is Veerle. I’ve been home from prison for seven months. We got on a call and talked for about an hour.

My friend and mentor Doran Larson has been asking a version of the same question for years — including in The Atlantic — what does it look like when a country actually rehabilitates people instead of just punishing them? As Larson wrote, “Prison doesn’t ‘fail’ so much as it succeeds at missions nobody in authority wants to acknowledge: punishment, humiliation, and separation from the community beyond the walls.” That conversation with Veerle brought it back.

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Here’s the thing about American prisons that you might know but maybe haven’t really sat with: they are a business.

Not just in the obvious sense. In every sense. The phone calls you make from inside cost five, six times what they should because a private contractor splits the revenue with the state. The tablet they handed us in 2020 — everything on it cost money. Commissary: private vendor. Medical care: private contractor. The system is designed, at almost every point of contact, to extract.

From people who have nothing.

Veerle told me that in Belgium, prisons are government property. The government builds them, runs them, answers for what happens inside. Nobody is getting rich off the incarcerated.

That one fact changes everything downstream.

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When you go to prison in the United States, you lose things beyond your freedom. Your voting rights, in most states, sometimes for good. Your record follows you to every job application, every apartment, every system you try to navigate after you get out.

In Belgium, you can assign a lawyer before you go in to protect your property. Your record for minor crimes disappears in three to five years. You keep your right to vote. Even with a 30-year sentence.

A life sentence doesn’t mean you die there. After 15 years you can request release. The door can stay closed — Veerle mentioned the Dutroux case, a child predator whose name became synonymous with Belgium’s darkest criminal history, and Kim De Gelder, a mass murderer who killed children in a daycare. But that’s rare. There is always a chance.

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Veerle said something I keep turning over. She said in Belgium they keep prisoners updated. When you come out, you know what a smartphone is. You haven’t been frozen.

I went into prison in 1999. I came out in October 2025. Twenty-six years. When I came out, everything had changed. The way you move through a city. The way you find an apartment. The way you exist. I wasn’t ready.

They put you in a freezer. They take you out years later into a world you don’t recognize. They call that corrections.

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Belgium carries debt. Veerle will tell you some of it goes to people who abuse the system. She’s not naive about it.

But she said something I think is the whole argument: Belgium invests in its citizens. Even the outlaws. Because the government believes everyone deserves a chance.

Trump calls Belgium soft. Veerle’s answer: yes. We’re soft on people. We think they’re worth something even after they’ve done harm.

That’s not weakness. That’s a decision about what a human being is worth.

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Here’s what the American model costs, and I’m not talking about money.

Every person who touches a prison is made worse by it. The person inside. The guard who goes home and doesn’t talk about what he saw. The teacher, the clerk, the case worker who watches violence accumulate around them for years and takes it home as secondary trauma. The 16-year-old girl who drove four hours to visit her father, a friend of mine, and got turned away at the scanner because she had a tampon in and it read as contraband. She was mortified. She never came back.

The good things that happened to me in prison happened despite it. I found them in spite of where I was. Then I came out and had to learn everything again.

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I asked Veerle why she’d done all that research. Why ten pages. Why reach out to a stranger.

She said she just wanted to know if what she’d heard was real.

It is. I told her that.

At the end of the call she said: when you have a sentence in the US, you always stay a prisoner.

She wasn’t wrong.