Amsterdam Nieuw West local council chairman Achmed Baâdoud is going to set up a campus where young offenders can serve the final months of their sentence. They will get help sorting out their debts, training and future housing. The Volkskrant talked to him.

Choice
The campus will not be a boot camp, according to Baâdoud. But neither will it be a hotel. Earlier versions were based solely on punishment and discipline. On Baâdoud’s campus offenders have a choice: they can either work or go to school. The system is based on a three-strikes-and-you’re-out system, he explains. ‘Failure to honour your commitments will end in having to go back to prison. The campus is not a soft option. There are no private rooms with television. The youths make breakfast together and then it’s off to school or work. In the evenings they are trained in social skills.’
The campus is meant for 16 to 24 year-olds, not necessarily only from Amsterdam Nieuw West but from all over the country. Baâd was inspired to set up the campus by a visit three years ago to a Salvation Army barracks in New York where young offenders were offered the same choice: work or training. ‘It worked, both for boys and girls’, he says.
Good practice
Recent figures show that 75 percent of young people reoffend within ten years. ‘They have no training, no job and often they have no home. They become phantom citizens’, says Baâdoud.
Baâdoud wants his campus to be up and running as soon as possible. ‘But we are not doing anything in a hurry. This campus has to become a good practice example for the rest of the country.’