Some serious events end lethally while others do not. This study examined to what extent a selected number of event characteristics and actors’ behaviour contributed to the escalation of an event into a lethal outcome. We examined Dutch court files of 267 serious events in which offenders were convicted for either lethal violence (homicide, N=126) or non-lethal violence (attempted homicide, N=141). Pronounced differences were found between lethal versus non-lethal events with respect to event characteristics and to actors’ behaviour during the incident in particular. In particular, the likelihood of a lethal outcome increased in events involving alcohol use by victims, firearm use by offenders, victim precipitation and the absence of third parties.

This study addresses next to the question to what extent offenders become victims themselves also and for the first time in the Netherlands the degree in which victims become suspects of criminal investigations themselves. Furthermore, this study also examines whether this reciprocal relationship is in fact spurious, caused by socio-demographic characteristics of individuals. Annual victimization survey data combined with longitudinal police data show a positive reciprocal relationship, even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics of individuals. Subgroups that score relatively low on offending and victimization show a stronger reciprocal relationship, while for subgroups with relatively high scores, the relationship is less strong or even negative.

On a yearly basis between 4.000 and 4.500 underage suspects in Flanders accept the offer of Restorative Justice. A many cited definition of Restorative Justice has been developed by Lode Walgrave: ‘Restorative Justice is every action that is primarily oriented toward doing justice by repairing the harm that has been caused by the crime’.
Commissioned by the Flemish Minister of Welfare, Public Health and Family an evaluation of Restorative Justice for minors was conducted by Bureau Beke. In the article the authors reflect on Restorative Justice in Flanders and describe the most important findings of their research. The process of Restorative Justice, the satisfaction of the parties involved and its results are considered. The authors offer organizations several suggestions related to developing established procedures and practices. Furthermore results show that suspects and victims are satisfied with Restorative Justice, which yields several benefits for the parties involved: Reparation for victims and learning effects and reduced contacts with counseling agencies for suspects. An important overall conclusion is that face-to-face contact between victim and suspects is beneficial for the mediation process and subsequently repairing the harm.

The theme of governing anti-social behaviour and incivilities in the public space became more important on the policy and research agenda over the last twenty years. This article describes the law on incivilities in Belgium, namely the ‘administrative communal sanctions’ (GAS). This law is studied in a broader context of contemporary crime control and its organizing patterns. The development of the politics of behaviour can be explained by different characteristics of the period referred to as the late modernity. In the dissertation ‘A culture of control?’ (Devroe 2012) we studied the application and the concrete strategies behind the governance of incivilities on a national and on a city level. The incivility law broadened the competences of the Mayor and the city council especially in the completion of anti social behaviour and public disorder problems in his/her municipality. Instead of being dealt with on a traditional judicial way by the police magistrate, the Mayor can, by this law; himself lay on fines until maximum 250 euro. We mention ‘city republics’ as this punitive sanction became a locally assigned matter, which means that one municipality differs from another in their ‘incivility policy’. Due to the split up of competences of the Belgian state arrangements of 1988, each municipality finds itself framed in different political and organisational executive realities. In this view, Mayors can be called ‘presidents’ of their own municipality, keeping and controlling the process of tackling incivilities as their main responsibility and determining what behaviour had to be controlled and punished and what behaviour can be considered as normal decent behaviour in the public space. Problems of creating a ‘culture of control’, creating inequality for the poor, the beggars and the socially ‘unwanted’ can arise, especially in big cities.

During the last decade the phenomenon of citizen watches has become a common and meaningful element in citizen participation that aims to improve local public safety. Citizen watches make a great case for examining the tension between the need for the Dutch government to maintain control over local safety issues and the strivings of citizens to contribute to local solutions in a more or less autonomous way. This paper examines the question to what extent citizen watches can contribute to the governance of local safety in a meaningful way. The Dutch government has been appealing strongly for more citizen involvement in public matters for some time, but is unclear about how municipalities and the police should respond to active citizens. The paper describes two different ways in which citizens can realize such an involvement i.e. either in a predominantly top-down fashion, in which the municipality and the police take a strongly directive approach towards citizen watches or in a more bottom-up oriented way, in which citizen watches are well embedded in local systems of informal social control. The paper argues and explains that both approaches have advantages as well as disadvantages regarding the way they support new forms of governance and cooperation between citizens and the state. It suggests that formal authorities can contribute to the self-reliance and collective efficacy of neighbourhood residents with regard to local public safety if they make a better effort of combining the pros of both approaches.

Contemporary scholarly literature is full of references to the crisis of the criminal justice system. The general public seems to increasingly lose confidence in the criminal justice system and its actors. In this article we look into the potential manners in which restorative justice practices can enhance the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Our analysis is based on the observation that by actively engaging victims and defendants in the resolution of their conflict, restorative practices seem to accommodate a necessary condition of procedural fairness. Since research on procedural justice and legitimacy in turn suggests that the legitimacy of the criminal justice system is based largely upon its perceived procedural fairness, we investigate whether participation in restorative practices improves perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. To that end we describe the results of a qualitative study on the experiences of victims and defendants who participated in victim-offender mediation in Belgium. Relating their experiences to the antecedents of procedural justice as described in the literature, we find that restorative practices in different ways enhance perceptions of procedural fairness. Yet these perceptions do not necessarily reflect on the criminal justice system. Our analysis suggests that the degree to which the perceptions of procedural fairness resulting from participation in a restorative practice influence an individual’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system depends on whether the restorative practice is seen as an integral part of the criminal proceedings. We found, for example, that this is more likely to be the case if the judge at trial formally acknowledges the parties’ participation in mediation. We conclude that more research on the degree to which people perceive the restorative practice to be a part of the criminal proceedings is needed in order to further flesh out this issue.

Over the past couple of decades, the Netherlands unmistakably has developed into a Garlandian style culture of control. A distinct feature of this Dutch culture of control is the increasing interconnectedness between crime and migration in both public and political discourse. As a result of the growing urge to control potential dangerous others, various stop & search powers have been implemented. Besides by their proactive nature, these powers are defined by the fact that they give a fair amount of discretion to individual police officers in deciding who to stop. In this article, while drawing on criminological, sociological and social psychological literature on stereotyping and the rise of a crime complex, the authors will argue that the structural and cultural changes fuelling the emergence of a the typical Dutch culture of control might also affect the individual choices made by police officers in such a way that it fosters ethnic profiling.

It seems common knowledge among criminologists that our societies have to be understood in terms of securitization. This means that security is the defining and organizing concept in (social) policy making. In the Netherlands the process of securitization can be characterized as rather contingent. According to the author, it can be typified as ‘pragmatic securitization’. It is driven by the desire to show decisiveness and being in control of complexity of social order, rather than by ideology. Under the pressure of the economic crisis there is a growing interest in self-organization, civic power and civil society. These themes emerge along the issues of security and control. Is it possible then that security is exchanged by another big social theme?

By introducing the historical concept of timescapes, we will investigate the transformation of a security to a risk culture in Dutch post war history. We will test Ulrich Beck’s paradigm of the risk society with respect to the Dutch policy arena, and we will analyze what drove this postulated transformation in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, not the 1970s/1980s, but the 1990s saw the onset of this change. Concrete trigger moments and the rise of a new populist movement around 1999 signalled the beginning of this new mode of risk governance that was consolidated after 2001. With this description, an attempt to historicize the development of an all encompassing national security culture is provided.

This article suggests that fears and concerns about disorder and crime are connected with urbanophobia, i.e. a low willingness to identify with public space and a certain incapacity to recognize deviancy and give it a place in one’s mind map. For this reason many citizens may not develop public familiarity. At the same time it is argued that tackling urban disorder is often necessary but not for reasons that proponents of repression and zero tolerance think. Current crime and disorder policies bring forth many counterproductive results, including increased fear and powerlessness. It seems more reasonable to combat disorder to undo the ‘situational normality’ of persistent forms of anti-social behaviour. For many citizens this signals a restoration of expected peaceful interaction.

Order in Security. A Dynamic Perspective (Schuilenburg 2012) is a theoretical and empirical study of self-organizing processes of change taking place within what the author calls ‘security assemblages’. In this review, the study is favorably evaluated as a form of empirical philosophy and praised for usefully introducing French philosophy into the field of security studies. In terms of empirical sociological research, however, the study is more critically reviewed as offering little insight into the perceptions, emotions, interpretations and meanings that actors assign to their conduct in this field.

In this interview with Marc Schuilenburg David Garland discusses the development of his ideas in his work, from Punishment and Welfare (1985) to Punishment and Modern Society (1990), and from The Culture of Control (2001) to Peculiar Institution (2010). Garland explains his view on the role of ideology in relation to punishment and the influence of Émile Durkheim on his work. He discusses the misreading of The Culture of Control by arguing that where most people focus on the punitive turn in the fight against criminality, the preventive turn is of much greater importance. Moreover he talks about the possibility of resistance against the process of securitization and elaborates on his new project on the welfare state.

Until approximately 1995, the Netherlands had a very low prison rate compared to the surrounding countries. David Downes, who made a comparison between the Dutch and the British penal policy, choose as a title for his book: Contrasts in Tolerance. He attributed the differences between England & Wales and the Netherlands, partly to the tolerant culture in the Netherlands compared to England & Wales (Downes, 1985: 69 e.v.). What exactly did he mean by tolerance in this context and in how far can this characteristic of Dutch penal policy explain the recent downfall of the Dutch prison population.

This introduction aims to position the present-day ‘liquid’ security culture in the context of cultural and political developments. Key-words in the cultural patterns in which the new ‘liquid policy’ and ‘new toughness’ is embedded are fear, precaution, late modern anomie and a social hypochondria towards everything that deviates from one’s ‘own’ culture and identity. These cultural phenomena have been translated in political terms, that are divided into neoliberal and neoconservative tendencies. The neoliberal turn in safety politics have resulted in a depoliticisation of democratic decision making, a desolidarisation of ideas on community safety and a deregulation of safety policies. Neoconservative tendencies are reflected in a resentment towards ‘the elites’, ‘the underclass’ and foreigners and a punitive populism, in which claims for stiffer sentences are continuously swept up, regardless of the effect they may have.

How can police officers make use of citizens’ religious beliefs when dealing with cases of honour-based violence (HBV)? In this article religion is addressed regarding motive and legitimisation of violence and as a social network of people and institutions for communities of believers. We focus on Islamic religion, because most cases of HBV handled by the police take place within Islamic communities and because the Dutch public debate on religion revolves around Islam. We interviewed police officers with expertise on HBV. These officers have an instrumental vision on religion. It helps them to gain insight in motives for violence and it offers opportunities for conflict mediation and coping with the aftermath of HBV.

Irregular immigrants were disproportionally present in jihadi movements in the Netherlands between 2001 and 2005. By analyzing closed police files and interviewing imams and personnel from Asylum Seeker Centers and Detention Centers, this paper claims that the attractiveness of jihadi movements can be explained by a combination of pragmatic and ideological factors. Jihadi movements are able to fulfil the needs of the irregular immigrants in a pragmatic way, in which crime is an important feature. In addition, the results show that irregular immigrants are searching for meaning, which the jihadi movements can offer. Nonetheless, the salafi-jihadi ideology does not seem to be the core factor to most of the illegally residing immigrants that expresses the attractiveness of the jihadi movements.