Opposition parties have criticised a pilot scheme to give prisoners electronic tablets showing softcore erotica to occupy them in their cells.

The prison service began a pilot scheme with the tablets in jails where staff shortages have led to daytime activities being cancelled.

Junior justice minister Claudia van Bruggen said she wanted to continue using the tablets so that hundreds of cells to be kept open in overcrowded Dutch jails.

Prisons are required to have a programme for inmates for at least 42 and a half hours a week, comprising work, visiting hours and recreational activities, to maintain order and security and ensure prisoners have a basic standard of living.

”Where the basic programme is unavailable, the governor is required under his duty of care to compensate with activities that in principle should take place outside the cell,” Van Bruggen wrote in a letter to MPs.

“In this pilot, the compensation takes the form of e-learning, e-books, documentaries and entertainment on tablets.”

“Inappropriate luxury”

But coalition party VVD and the far-right opposition party PVV tabled a motion calling for the tablets to be scrapped, calling them an “inappropriate luxury”.

Opposition MPs also expressed concern that the tablets could be used by criminals to make contact with people on the outside.

Van Bruggen said she had asked the prison service to carry out an early evaluation of the scheme so that she could decide in June whether to make any changes.

She said: “In view of the discussion about soft erotic content and the definition of it, one outcome of the evaluation could be to remove this content,” she said.

But she criticised the idea of taking the tablets away altogether, pointing out that other countries were increasingly using them, including the United States, where prisoners can make video calls from their cells.

“Reducing our capacity and thereby putting further pressure on our ability to carry out sentences that have been imposed is something I regard as undesirable from the point of view of victims and society,” the minister wrote.