Municipalities play an increasingly important role in the fight against organized crime. Following Italian and New York examples, the Netherlands have developed several instruments for an administrative approach to organized crime. This article describes these instruments on a local and a national level and discusses its theoretical foundations. A critical assessment is made on the reach of this administrative approach considering the perception and nature of organized crime in the Netherlands. Further, methods for assessing the effectiveness of such an approach are discussed. Has organized crime successfully been targeted and how could this be established?

Lately, mayors’ powers for maintaining public order and safety have been considerably extended, and even more powers are in preparation. These powers must enable the mayor to act quickly against public order disturbances and security threats. The novelty is that the mayor may conditionally use and exercise these new powers preventively against groups of rioters. Their freedom of action and their privacy can also be considerably curtailed. This means these powers have to be used carefully and reluctantly. If the mayor overdoes the crimefighter role, he/she may lose the public’s confidence.

In the local governance of public safety many different organizations are involved. These organizations cooperate in local networks or partnerships to manage problems related to crime and disorder. In the Netherlands the local government should coordinate the cooperation between these organizations and their activities. Research shows that in practice this coordination has many serious shortcomings.
Therefore the Dutch government proposed a new Act to promote the local government’s capacities to coordinate these networks and local policies of public safety (Wet op de gemeentelijke regierol lokale integrale veiligheid). At this moment this proposal has not yet been submitted to the Dutch Parliament.
This Act will create new obligations and powers for the local government. According to this Act every four years local councils will have to establish a public safety policy plan based on an analysis of local problems of crime and disorder. Local governments should make formal agreements with the local partner agencies about their activities. Additionally the Act will provide local governments with the power to enforce these cooperation and contributions and to sanction it.
Research shows that many of the problems that arise in the coordination of these networks and partnerships result from the local governments themselves. Often the governmental support and commitment to local safety issues are insufficient, the local administration is highly fragmented, the coordination is often poorly implemented and local administration often have a bureaucratic culture that is hard to reconcile with the need to react quickly to urgent local problems.
Considering these problems the authors argue that this proposed Act is not an adequate solution for the problems that arise in the coordination of local safety policies and partnerships.

Public safety has always been a core task for local, municipal authorities. However, until rather recently only the police has been actively involved in addressing local problems of public safety and maintaining order instead. Local public safety policy – as a responsibility for local authorities together with many other partners – is a relatively new phenomenon.This article compares the main developments and trends in local public safety policy in the Netherlands and Belgium. Special attention is paid to the role and position of the local, municipal authorities. What strikes most, are the strong similarities between the two countries. National governments played an important and catalyzing role in the development of public safety policy in the Netherlands as well as in Belgium. After many years and not without a lot of trouble, the monopoly of the police on designing and implementing policy for addressing public safety and order came to an end in both countries. Which, amongst other effects, presented the local authorities with new challenges.

Juvenile crime has been present form the Midle Ages onward, although it was nly described as a separate phenomenon in the Nineteenth Century. This article explores the similarities and notions of juvenile crime from a long-term perspective. This sheds another light on present-day youth problems and delinquency and ways to prevent and/or punish them.

Since the last years there is extensive ongoing debate in Belgium about jury trials at the Assize Court. These trials are an example of direct participation of citizens in the criminal justice system. Hence this jury has obtained a special position in the Belgian administration of justice. Jury deliberations behind closed doors and the isolation of jury members from the outside world contribute to the fascination for this legal phenomenon. The element of secrecy also explains why there is so little empirical research on the jury’s functioning and the jurors’ experiences during the process. By means of interviews with former jury members, we studied the influence of lay participation in a jury trial on their views and confidence in jury decision making. We found that a positive evaluation of participation in a jury may strengthen their involvement with and trust in jury decision making. However, our research also reveals that jury trials may lead to some unacceptable deficits in the proceedings and outcome of the process. These results are contextualised in the broader debate about the jury and the demand for reform of the assize court proceedings.

In the Netherlands, the number of cocaine traffickers arrested at Schiphol International Airport peaked in 2003. In May 2003, sentencing guidelines regarding cocaine traffickers were redefined into a smaller number of categories (wider quantity ranges, less specified offender categories) with lower sentences than before. New guidelines allowed criminal courts more flexibility, and judges were expected to sentence cocaine traffickers more often than before in accordance with guidelines. All cases, at all four applicable criminal courts, against cocaine traffickers that had been arrested at Schiphol in 2003 were analyzed (877 simple court and 994 full court cases). In between 30 and 40 percent of cases sentences were not according to the guidelines (mostly lower), and even more frequently than before the new guidelines had been introduced. Experience as a judge (number of years) was not associated with keeping up with guidelines, but male judges sentenced suspects more often than female judges in discordance with guidelines (and consequently below guidelines). In line with American literature, personal characteristics of suspects appeared strong predictors of the extent judges conformed to sentencing guidelines. Female offenders were twice as often as male offenders sentenced lower than the guidelines. The same result was found for offenders born or living in the Netherlands, versus migrants and offenders living abroad.

Marriage is considered to be an important life-course event that can lead to desistance from a criminal career. However, desistance is far less obvious when offenders marry criminal partners. The aim of this study is to investigate what impact a spouse’s criminal career at the time of marriage has on persistence in crime. To analyze the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and criminal offending, we use a unique longitudinal dataset: the Criminal Career and Life-course Study. This is the first study that contains longitudinal data on the criminal careers of both offenders and their partners. Results show that the frequency of criminal conviction is lower if men marry non-criminal spouses. However, if men marry criminal spouses, their conviction rate does not differ from those who remain single. For women, on the other hand, marriage is related to lower conviction frequencies no matter the spouse’s criminal history.

This research aimed to describe the remigration of Bulgarian women who had been exploited in prostitution in the Netherlands. The difficulties they encountered during their attempt to reintegrate in their environment of origin was one of the main points of interest. Files of Bulgarian women registered as victims have been analyzed in both the Netherlands and in Bulgaria. Interviews were held with current Bulgarian sex workers, former victims of trafficking and several professionals involved in the wellbeing of these women. In many cases remigration turned out to be a temporary situation as many women returned to the Netherlands later on. Partly for that reason it appeared difficult to keep track of their situation after they (initially) came back to Bulgaria. Many women encounter the very problems that contributed to the situation of trafficking in the first place. This makes it difficult to change their marginal position: prostitution remains a well paid option if the circumstances that have led to their exploitation in prostitution remain the same. This does not necessarily lead to repeated victimization, but at least to only a limited difference that reintegration programs can make.

There is a natural alliance between the ambitions of prison chaplaincy and those of restorative justice in the sense that in both approaches (coping with) responsibility and guilt by offenders are important issues and mechanisms at the same time. Both share a relational concept of crime, consider the evil deed as occasion to start a dialogue to examine responsibility, stress the importance of process and bi-lateral partiality with both the victim and the offender. Coping with guilt and making it productive requires that communication with the offender reaches the deeper and more intimate levels of giving meaning to the criminal offence committed, self, others, past and future. For this communication the context should be open and fundamentally loving in a Christian sense, leading the way to a liberation from guilt once it is thoroughly known and accepted. At that point guilt can be transformed into a constructive moral impetus in human relations.

This article explores the links between the concepts of security and community, questioning the conventional use and meaning of both. To begin with, it addresses the taken-for-grantedness of the thought that communities foster feelings of security, and that contemporary processes of migration, intensified worldwide communication, and ‘heterogeneization’ of habitats stimulate feelings of insecurity and nostalgia for ‘old-fashioned’ tight kinship. Subsequently, it criticizes the too lop-sided focus on insecurity in current debates, and asks attention for – community-based – positive feelings of security. In the next paragraphs, however, the problematic aspects of the idea of ‘community’ are discussed: its inadequacy in capturing current individualized ways-of-life, its exclusionary tendencies, its potentially exaggerated focus on social control, and its rejection of, and fear for, the outside world. Therefore, we assess the possibility to construe (‘strong’) community qualities in a situation of multiple, overlapping and porous populations of varied identity-relevance within overarching institutional arrangements of rule of law and of shared codes of conduct (as ‘weak’ ties). Finally, the argument is translated in suggestions for empirical research to be able to determine the fecundity of the ideas presented.

A part in Dutch penal law defines money laundering as ‘any person who acquires an object, possesses it, hands it over or sells it or makes use of an object, knowing that the object originates – directly or indirectly – from an offense’. Under object is meant any goods and any property rights. With this in mind, the author argues that whoever knows that money (the object) is derived from crime, but spends the money anyway, is committing a money laundering offense. Taking the argument one step further, it is therefore a reasonable hypothesis that a large number of wives or girlfriends of criminals, have been prosecuted for money laundering. That is, if the women knew that the money they spent was obtained through crime. To test the hypothesis, 62 cases dealing with organized crime were selected and analyzed. These cases largely focus on male perpetrators of drug crimes, money laundering, human smuggling and human trafficking. It turns out that the women often knew their male friends or husbands were involved in crime. The women also profited of these crimes because they used their friends’ expensive cars, lived in large mansions and often went shopping for luxury items. Still, hardly anyone was prosecuted for money laundering offenses. Several explanations were found, ranging from pity of officers, an overload of work, absence of direct proof or simply male chauvinist bias. Only if the women were actively involved in other crimes, would they find themselves prosecuted with (among others) money laundering offenses.