Suspects who are unemployed, poorly educated or without a stable home receive on average tougher treatment in the Dutch justice system than better-off suspects facing comparable charges, two new studies have found.
The pattern is driven less by judges imposing harsher sentences for the same offence than by which cases reach them, according to the justice ministry’s research centre, the WODC.
Suspects in a stronger position are more often dealt with early and out of court – through a fine, community service or a prosecutor’s penalty order – while those in a weaker position more often end up before a judge, where outcomes are heavier and leave a lasting record.
Small decisions by police, prosecutors and judges, the researchers said, accumulate into large differences in the final sentence.
Work and education weigh most
The studies examined suspects’ education, income, work and housing. Work and education mattered most: those with a job or qualifications received on average lighter penalties than those without. Taken across all cases, the WODC concluded, this produces structurally worse outcomes for suspects in a weaker position.
Migration background played a smaller part than socioeconomic factors – a shift in emphasis from the first report in the project a year ago, which centred on ethnic selectivity.
But it had not vanished: second-generation suspects were still more likely to be sent before a judge and given heavier sentences, even after socioeconomic differences were taken into account. Suspects with no fixed address were relatively often jailed.
Not proof of bias
The WODC stressed that the differences do not automatically point to deliberate discrimination, and that it could not say whether any individual case had been wrongly decided.
It pointed instead to how defendants come across and explain themselves in interviews and hearings, and to “mental shortcuts” such as linking unemployment to a higher risk of reoffending.
Police, prosecutors and judges have wide discretion and face limited requirements to justify their choices, the researchers added, making it hard to see why similar cases are handled differently. They called the pattern socioeconomic selectivity.
The studies were commissioned after parliamentary motions on the over-representation of people with a migration background in crime figures and on possible “class justice” – the idea that the system treats people differently according to social standing. The government has said it will respond before the end of the year.
