The mayor of Amsterdam plans to exile nuisance neighbors and anti-social citizens to stark "housing camps," where offenders would be housed under constant police supervision, the Telegraph reports.
Amsterdam's plan is at the behest of the capital city's Labour party mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, according to the Telegraph, who said his city fields close to 13,000 complaints of anti-social behavior every year. The program is slated to begin in January.
A special team of district officials will help identify offenders, and if their behavior does not improve they will risk being moved into the shipping container housing sites, according to Dutch News. Offenders would remain in the container camps under supervision for six months.
The mayor's spokesman has denied that the camps are ghettos that may ultimately turn into "no go areas," according to the Irish Times.
"We have learned from the past, and so we’re well aware that while a [neighborhood] can usually deal with one problem family, if there are any more living together in close proximity the situation has a tendency to escalate,” spokesman Bartho Boer said.
“On the other hand, the aim of this scheme is not to reward people who behave badly with a brand-new, five-room home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent. It has to work," he added.
These new camps have been labeled "scum camps" by some, due to their similarity in concept to an earlier proposal by right wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
In 2011, the outspoken Wilders said trouble-making citizens should be separated from their law-abiding peers, Dutch News reports.
"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their [neighborhood] and sent to a village for scum," Wilders said. "They will then be put into converted containers as homes. If juveniles are involved, their families should be moved too. Put all the trash together."
The controversial comment sparked much debate in the Netherlands, and the Dutch word "tuigdorpen" (scum villages), was named the nation's "word of the year" in a poll conducted by the leading national dictionary Van Dale, RT.com reports.
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