Prisons

File: data/prisons.json. The 39 prisons and detention houses of the FPS Justice (Directorate-General of Penitentiary Institutions).

Why it's useful

• Writing to a detainee or their prison. Lawyers, families and services need the prison's address and phone number; the names differ by language (Gevangenis van Bergen, Prison de Mons, Gefängnis Mons).
• Depositing money. Where FPS Justice publishes the prison's account for money for detainees, it's in the contacts as a bank-account, checksum verified.
• Forms and case files. A stable id per institution to store with a file, and a list to pick from.

Source and updates

Source	FPS Justice: Belgian prisons, each prison's page in Dutch, French and German
Built by	scripts/parse from the weekly snapshots
Changes when	A prison opens or closes, or changes its contact details
Covers	20 October 2026 onwards, the day the site was first read: lookups for an earlier day throw a RangeError (time)
Checked	Every week, by the sources workflow
Licence	CC BY 4.0

Fields

Field	Type	Description
id	PrisonId	From the name in the local language, without articles: gevangenis-gent, prison-lantin, detentiehuis-kortrijk
validFrom, validTo	string?	The days the record applies, as the site listed it; none: since the coverage starts, or still applies. See time
kind	'prison' | 'detention-house'	A detention house holds people with short sentences, close to home
name	{ nl, fr, de }	As FPS Justice publishes it
address	Address	In the local language, with the municipality its postal code belongs to (municipality, by REFNIS code)
contacts	Contact[]	Phone, fax, e-mail and the account for money for detainees, where published
website	{ nl, fr, de }	The prison's page per language
sources	{ url, retrieved }[]	The pages the record was read from

The name of the director, which the pages also give, is left out: it changes, and it's personal data the package doesn't need.

import { getPrison, prisons } from 'belgica/prisons'

getPrison('gevangenis-gent').name.fr // 'Prison de Gand'
prisons.filter((p) => p.kind === 'detention-house') // Kortrijk, Olen, Vorst