The juridical system in Belgium is a joke. Death penalty is automatically transferred to life in prison, which adds up to 30 years. Mostly criminals only have to serve one third of their sentence. So that's about ten years. The time they were taken into confinement before the trial also gets subtracted from the sentence.
This creates the situation where a full-on murderer gets away with only serving 7-8 years or less. Ridiculous.
(one might actually start to consider it...)

I've known rapists to only serve 1 year in prison. One year after conviction, the victim might see her agressor on a daily basis, on the street or I don't know where else. This is a high possibility, especially when you know that people that are a victim of a rape have a high chance of knowing their agressor. Personally.

Now they are testing a new sort of sentence here in Belgium : electronic supervision. The criminals remain at home, but they have to wear an electronic device which tracks their every move. If they don't comply with their sentence, they have to serve the remaining part of it in a real-life prison. One of the benefits is supposedly that the criminal doesn't have to reintegrate into society since he never really left it. The downside is : I know of at least two cases in which an (attempted) murder payed his victim a new visit to finish the job.
But politicians still claim electronic supervision is a success. Long live progress!

And don't get me started on the prisons itself : most of them might actually qualify to be 4 or 5 star hotels ! The days of moulded water and dried out bread are definitely history. One example : since a few years "good prisoners" get penitentiary leave ! That's right, if they've been good for a couple of months, they can go home for say, a week. Needless to say, a big percentage of them "forgets" to return afterwards. Best of all : when they are found and re-imprisoned, their sentence keeps on ticking as if nothing has happened. No extra measures, no nothing.

I work with criminals on a daily basis, and I can only say that the juridical system has become a joke : all the rights for the convict, practically none for the victim.
I've actually been in the situation where I've put somebody in jail in november (for 6 months), and the guy was actually happy. This way he had a roof over his head and three decent meals a day. AND he got a bed, his own refrigirator AND a TV! The guy couldn't be happier! Now call me stupid, but I don't think that's the intention of a prison, that people are actually HAPPY when they have to go there.
Nah, the juridical system is really f**ked up... and then they wonder why people have lost their faith in it.