Since the publication of a special issue in TvC (the Dutch Journal of Criminology) on the spatial distribution of crime, about fifteen years ago, a vast number of developments have been observed in the field of social ecology and environmental criminology. During this period many studies have been undertaken in the Netherlands and Belgium. However, there still is room for progress, e.g. through the study of new contexts beyond the traditional boundaries of residential neighbourhoods and through the use of promising new methodologies and technological developments. This special issue provides some examples of such innovative research on environmental influences on crime. In this introductory article the authors provide an overview of the background of the theme, and discuss recent theoretical and methodological developments. They move on to discuss contemporary studies that have been carried out in the Netherlands and Belgium, and outline some desirable and necessary future developments. Finally, the authors provide the reader with an overview of the other contributions to this special issue.

The present study investigates the existence of independent effects of community level social processes on fear of crime. Attention is paid to social trust and informal control, two dimensions of Sampson’s famous concept of collective efficacy. The model is tested on three well-known dimensions of fear of crime: perceived risk of victimisation, emotional fear and avoidance behaviour. The results suggest an independent effect of neighbourhood social trust on all three dimensions, when control is hold for demographic background variables and individual levels of social capital. The effect of neighbourhood social trust is mediated by neighbourhood disorder.

Can a fruitful police surveillance scheme be based on supposedly increased risk immediately after and around a previous burglary (‘near repeat phenomenon’)? An experiment in Amstelveen has been set up and analysed for this purpose. Some neighbourhoods got a ‘near repeat surveillance’ scheme, and the occurrence of burglary in those areas has been compared with control neighbourhoods elsewhere in town. We observed a change in the near repeat pattern in the experimental area, but no net effect on burglary rates, presumably because of large between-neighbourhood variance in incidence.

Felson introduced the concept of offender convergence settings in his articles on situational crime prevention. He refers to physical locations where criminals get together to relax, share information, fence stolen goods, plot new crimes, etc. Such places come in the form of restaurants and cafes that are in the hands of the ‘underworld’, but may equally well consist of deserted schoolyards where unruly adolescents gather. According to Felson, such settings facilitate the committing of crimes and enable the creation of structure and continuity in criminal networks.
In this article the authors argue that virtual meeting places also exist that can be labeled as offender convergence settings. To demonstrate this, a case study regarding a so-called ‘carding’ forum is used. Carding is a term from the world of cybercrime and refers to the set of techniques by which personal financial information is acquired, traded and abused by criminals. Through a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the carding forum, the possibilities for cyber criminals to come into contact with each other, co-offending, and the durability of the criminal network is analyzed.

Technological progress has a great impact on the lives of many citizens. The increasing amount of available information may however be used by criminals too, for example by burglars in their search for a suitable target. Applying the rational choice perspective and by means of an experiment with students, this paper first investigates whether it is likely or not that tools such as Google Maps and Google Street View are used for burglary. Furthermore, we investigate whether the considered target characteristics differ when such tools are used. The results indicate that we cannot give an affirmative answer to these questions so far.

Criminological research on perceptions and behavior in an environmental context, scarcely uses virtual environments. Such virtual environments are available on the Internet or can be created. They can be presented to research participants either online or in a laboratory setting. This article gives a brief overview of criminological studies employing a virtual environment and describes a case study that used a virtual environment in order to investigate disorder. Despite the pitfalls, there are certainly possibilities for (criminological) research in virtual environments. The spatial context provided by a virtual environment, seems suitable for research in environmental criminology in particular.

Biographies of ‘criminals’ are an immensely popular genre. As ‘true crime’ stories they are generally found on the shelves of fiction literature. In this article the authors examine their cultural criminological significance. First, they examine what makes a ‘good’ biography, analyse how biographical material is used in the work of people like Robert Park and his Chicago School, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and indeed historians. Then the authors list different traditions of criminal biographies. They conclude by arguing that ‘good biographies’, i.e. biographies that are both sufficiently emic and offer enough context information, have a lot to offer, because they show ‘the other side’ of criminology, provide information that cannot be obtained through strictly scientific methods and counter the reductionist images prevailing in the discipline.

In his first book Knock-out from 2009, Rein Gerritsen tells his story of how easy it is to end up on the wrong path. Conversely, in the second part of his autobiography, 13 accidents, he explains how hard it is as an ex-convict to stay on the right track. This goes to show that there is much truth in what they say: ‘The real punishment only starts after you’re out.’ This article is an excerpted pre-publication from 13 accidents.

In biographies a structure perspective is common to place the key person in a context of time and place. Apart from opportunities and obstacles, also cultural frames for interpretation vary with context. In this article a second, interaction perspective is added. This can best be applied if the key person cooperates in the research and if an emic approach is used. A recent life history of Jan Hoolwerf demonstrates how the key person comes to various presentations of self that can be understood as poses that fit specific settings.

The central question of this article is whether biographies can be a source for criminological research on white-collar crime and how they can contribute to the explanation of white-collar crime. To answer this question, 35 Dutch biographies were studied. Following the legal ambiguities of white-collar crime, not all of these biographies are about criminal offences. And following the dominant anthropomorphic approach to corporate crime, some of these are corporate biographies. Many biographies confirm current criminological explanations of the causation of white-collar crime. Yet, biographies also offer additional insights, for instance about the causal relevance of the private life of white-collar offenders.

This article analyses a criminal family. It is not the individual, but the family as a social entity that is central to this approach. The Van D.’s are a family of eleven brothers with a collective history of crime. Raised with anti-authoritarian norms, violence, alcohol and a strong sense of loyalty, they were known as an ‘army of brothers’ dominating the streets of H-town. The criminal family as object of study proves valuable in understanding the influence of contextual factors, subculture, and stigmatization. In the case of the Van D.’s, blood ties create cohesion and conflict at the same time.

Most biographies on criminals have been written by journalists. Dutch writer and former journalist Sytze van der Zee wrote portraits of two serial killers. In order to reconstruct the criminal facts and the police investigations in both cases, he collected data by gathering as much documents as possible, and by interviewing the main characters. For the second biography, he had many conversations with the serial killer. In this interview, Sytze van der Zee tells about his motivation to write these books, the research methods he used, the reliability of the collected information, and his experiences while researching.