The Ability of Human Rights to Limit the State’s Power to Punish in Europe: Connecting Prison and Mental Health Policies through the Concept of “Transpolicies”

While scholars have pointed out the factors determining the impediments to and efficacy of international human rights rules, poor attention has been paid to human rights violations relating to transfers between prison and psychiatric detention. There is a lack of intersection of policy spheres in this regard that should be remedied. Our contribution aims to challenge traditional sociolegal boundaries by integrating the intersection of policy and subdisciplines that cover penal justice (prison and police stations), psychiatric institutions, and human rights. Raising the question of human rights’ ability to limit the state’s power to punish in Europe compels us to explore different forms of “transinstitutionalization,” especially between prisons and psychiatric institutions and between prisons and immigration detention centers that present as “total institutions” (hosting populations perceived to be “deviant”), and share many similarities, including the risk of human rights violations. We forge the concept of “transpolicies” to take into account the mutual influence and the domino effects of such detention policies that are acknowledged, and both promoted and fought, by the European human rights institutions. In the empirical part, we focus on the increasing interactions between prison and mental health policies, taking Belgium as an example as it is known to raise specific human rights challenges.