Syrian girls, from left, Shahd Alamar, 8, Lana Alkhawaja, 9, Maya Alamar, 4, holding balloons, Amal Sakkal, 8, and Hala Alhalaby, 8, play in a corridor known as Kalverstraat, referring to a busy shopping street in Amsterdam, at the former prison of Bijlmerbajes in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
These Empty Prison Cells Are Now Home to Refugees
Amsterdam’s Bijlmerbajes prison no longer houses inmates, but asylum seekers awaiting their new lives.
To tell the story of migrants fleeing violence is to tell a story without an obvious face or setting. So when Europe’s migrant crisis began in 2015, Associated Press photographer Muhammed Muheisen decided to wait on a beach in Greece, watching the flow of refugees from Syria, the Middle East, and war-torn parts of Africa. “Most people think that once people arrive, the story’s over. But to me, that’s just when the story starts,” he says.
Muheisen focused his lens in the Netherlands, a country with both a willingness to accept migrants and a declining level of crime. Too many empty cells left the Dutch government looking for other uses for its prisons. So they began to fill them
