In this article, theories on organisational crime are applied to the involvement of the German corporation Topf & Söhne in the Holocaust. This corporation produced ovens for various concentration and destruction camps in Germany and Poland and contributed significantly to the execution of the Holocaust with their innovative products. The motivation to procure these ovens to the SS does not seem to stem from force, ideological agreement or maximisation of profit. Instead loss-minimisation and a ‘culture of perfection’ seem to form the explanation. Opportunity was provided by the Nazi-Germany regime and the knowledge and skills were already at hand within the organisation. Because of the close collaboration between these two parties, this case can be qualified as a form of state-corporate crime. Administrative, political and social control was absent and neutralisations only seem to have been formed after the Holocaust. The analysis shows how theories about ‘regular’ organisational criminality can form an explanation of the involvement of corporations in international crimes.

Little is known about children when the mothers are imprisoned. Especially in the Netherlands, hardly any empirical research has been conducted regarding the whereabouts and psychological well-being of children with incarcerated mothers. We visited and collected data from four female prisons. Via the mothers’ consent we contacted the children and their caregivers. First, we conducted a semi-structured interview about the wellbeing of the child during the separation through detention of mother and child. Second, we asked mothers and caregivers to complete checklists of behavioral problems. The caretaking situation turned out to be diverse. Generally, the children experienced both internalizing and externalizing behavioural problems and specific problems associated with the detention of their mothers. The well-being of the children seems to be partially related with the incarceration of the mother. However, it also turned out that quite a few risk factors such as a broken home and neglect is present for the child being raised. Results are discussed as well as some recommendations for future research.

Increasingly, instruments for risk assessment have been used for the assessment of future violence. This article provides an overview of the risk assessment instruments that are used in the Netherlands for the prediction of criminal recidivism. The quality of these instruments is regarded by examining studies on the interrater reliability and the predictive validity. The benefits as well as the limitations of risk assessment instruments are discussed. It is concluded that these instruments can be valuable, especially for research on treatment effects in the field of forensic psychiatry. On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that with risk assessment instruments, the possibility to predict criminal recidivism on individual level is still limited. Psychologist and psychiatrists, presenting a mental health assessment to the court, have to inform the judge correctly about these limitations.

Computers and the internet offer new ways to offenders for committing crimes. The present article uses routine activity theory and large-scale victimization survey data (N=6,896) to study digital threat victimization (i.e. threats people receive by email or chat rooms) in the general population. It assesses risk factors for digital threats and compares them with risk factors for receiving traditional threats and a mixture of digital and traditional threats. The results show that youngsters and offenders of digital crime run higher risks of all types of threat victimization. In extension, outdoor routine activities increase the risk not only of traditional threats but of digital threats as well, while the same holds for certain computer activities (e.g. having a profile on Hyves). These findings point towards the connection of social interactions between people in the physical and digital world. Finally, the results suggest that impulsive people are more vulnerable to threat victimization.

This article focuses on the Madoff case which came to light at the end of 2008. Remarkable for this case is that Madoff could go on with his scam for a very long time. Failing supervision was not the only reason for this. Madoff’s qualities – disguising the illegal activities and his social stature – cannot explain the whole puzzle. The social network, a ‘secret society’ and the fact that people involved went on with it, even when knowing that ‘it was too good to be true’ are explained in this article.

How can the use of policy theories help to improve the development and evaluation of public policy. This question is central to this contribution. In order to answer this question, an overview is made of the development of the concept policy theory and its application in The Netherlands. More specifically, the relation between the rational approach of using policy theories and the quest for evidence-based policy is made. In addition, the possibilities and risks of theory-based evaluation ex post are explored. An important issue in both policy development and policy evaluation is the quality of policy information: which evidence counts? What quality criteria should be in place? On the basis of recent research by the Netherlands Court of Audit, an assessment is made of the actual quality of the ex ante evidence-based nature and the ex post effectiveness of safety policy in The Netherlands. The article presents conclusions and perspectives on how a more theoretical underpinning of policy programmes and a good use of theory-based evaluations may contribute to public policies that are not only effective, but that are also more open to policy-oriented learning.

The focus of this article is the relation between the factual conditions of the environmental quality of streets and neighborhoods and the perception of livability by residents.Through analysis of evaluation of environmental quality by residents, combined with observations by trained professionals of certain aspects of the environment (population, demography, type of housing etcetera) it was possible to identify the relations between the way livability is perceived, aspects of the neighborhood and household characteristics. By zooming in on the aspects environmental and personal security and safety the article shows how the environmental quality influences residents perceptions.

In measuring safety a difference appears to exist between ‘objectively measured safety’ and the subjective perception by the public. Objectively spoken the level of criminality in a neighbourhood may have gone down, but that doesn’t necessary mean that the people living there ‘feel equally safer’. Psychology gives a number of explanations for this phenomenon. For example, the knowledge, the differences in thinking styles and communication about safety with citizens play an important role. This should not be seen as a case of non-rational thinking, but rather of systematic irrationality. These people are not ‘dumb’, they have (sometimes hard-wired) ways of handling information about complex issues like safety that require them to take ‘mental shortcuts’ (heuristics) in order to estimate the risks they are exposed to. This paper will focus on some of the psychological laws that guide our risk perception and surprisingly enough, the ‘objective risk’ seems to be of relatively little importance if compared with other, more subjective factors. Many of the factors relate to the nature of information citizens are exposed to: a risk that this described in easy to imagine way leads to a different evaluation of that risk compared with a less conspicuous presentation. Also the level of expertise of the ‘receiving end’ must be taken into account. Lay-people have different ways to look at risks compared with experts in a certain domain. The discussion on how to improve safety is probably best served with a continuing debate between ‘rational, objective’ and ‘systematic irrational, subjective’ mental models, while recognising their respective strengths and weaknesses. These findings may assist policy makers in particular in the formulation of policy that, in addition to the security objective as such, also improves the perception of safety.

The author reports on the doctorate research that she presented in 2009. Restorative practices have not often been researched as a praxis of social work, on the interface between giving help and administering justice. The author situates restorative mediation as a form of social work on the threshold between the private and the public, a threshold that she considers to be of a social nature.Restorative mediation as social work should contribute to values such as human dignity and social justice. The author observed and studied restorative mediation in adult on the one hand and juvenile criminal cases on the other (in Flanders, Belgium) and found that these practices differ widely.Although in both kind of practices responsibility and restoration are central concepts, their meanings differ fundamentally: in youth cases the offer of restorative mediation departs from a critical pedagogy oriented at emancipation, holding on to protective arrangements at the same time. Societal developments changed the image of youngsters from victims of society into risks for society and this may have implied that social problems around criminality are now also by mediation transformed into individual problems for which juveniles should be held accountable.In adult criminal cases the approach was initially much more on civic responsibility for the harm done to victims and since mediation was only offered in serious cases the courts always had their say too.Reflecting upon her research the author questions whether dominant social norms can be and still are challenged in the praxis of mediation. Restorative mediation has become incorporated into the existing institutional arrangements relevant to juveniles and adults: with juvenile cases the logic of prevention seems to become dominant. The practices seem to become exercises in taking responsibility within the traditional normative framework. On the threshold between the private and the public restorative practices, with their self-image of being a more humane form of law enforcement, run the risk of becoming blind for the potential effect of criminalization of their clients.

The authors latest book on Restorative Justice, Self-Interest and Responsible Citizenship has been discussed in this journal in 2009 and the author now responds to the critiques, which came from three jurists and therefore had a predominantly juristic character. Themes discussed are ‘criminal justice and punishment’, ‘restorative justice and the law’, ‘restorative justice, the victim and public interest’, ‘restorative justice and the legal order’ and finally ‘restorative justice and offender rehabilitation’. Walgrave maintains and clarifies the views he developed in the book explaining why it is correct to claim that criminal justice can be identified as fundamentally punitive (although it does not always punish, as one critic has observed) and that it should be possible to elaborate restorative justice into a completely new legal system, offering legal guarantees fitting to what restorative justice is trying to achieve. Legal guarantees as they exist today in criminal procedure cannot be taken as the benchmark for restorative procedures in view of the totally different aims and procedures. Furthermore, it is not true that the victim gets too much power in restorative justice – as one critic stated – because restorative justice is and should be conceived as a system of public law, involving the legal agencies and authorities such as courts in a proper role as guardians of every citizin’s dominion. It is because of the safeguarding of dominion that the victim should have a key-role to play in restorative justice, although not obliged to participate.One critic has mentioned that Walgraves ideas seem to imply that the legal order is only something being imposed upon the citizens ‘top down’, while in many respects one could maintain that the law and the principles of the legal order have been produced ‘bottom-up’ or at least should be the result of democracy. The response is that restorative procedures offer more opportunities for citizens for this democratic participation in producing the norms of the law.Finally some have argued that the rehabilitative interests of the offender should have a more central place in the definition of restorative justice, more or less of the same importance as restoring the harms of the victim. Walgraves experiences with the Belgian model of juvenile protection made him cautious of the risks of doing so, not only in terms of serving the victims needs, but also in terms of the legal protection of the juvenile offender against arbitrary interventions.

Just over thirty years ago now, on 12^th January 1977 to be precise, Sir Anthony Bottoms presented his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Criminology at the University of Sheffield, UK. The full text of this almost prophetic Lecture was subsequently published in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and reached a much wider audience. One of its central themes was the emerging tendency within British criminal justice policy to treat really serious offenders in a significantly different manner from their less serious counterparts with whom a more lenient approach might be justified. This tendency he described as penal bifurcation.There were two reasons why such an apparently logical approach might be found exceptionable: the first relates to the general principal of treating like cases similarly, and the second that the practice was proposed on the basis of the relative extent of social risk that might be claimed to differentiate serious from less serious offending. Bifurcation in both of these forms is evident in the use within some jurisdictions of extended and indeterminate sentences for public protection, and in many respects also within parole release considerations.The central proposition in relation to bifurcation within this article is, however, of a somewhat different nature. Restorative justice places considerable reliance upon offenders accepting responsibility for their offences, showing remorse for the harm done to victims in the form of genuine apology, and then making reparation either to the victim(s) directly, or to victims of crime more generally. These principles apply equally to serious and less serious offenders, though the extent of reparation should logically be greater as the crime increases in gravity.In an era of widely increasing penal populations it is apparent that these escalations result from increased severity of sentencing on the one hand, and from wider use of custody and lower thresholds for imposing it on the other. Both forms of resort to custody in sentencing are increasingly justified on the basis of public protection, and to act otherwise is perceived (and often promoted in the media) as being ‘soft on crime’. Politicians anxious to retain electoral credibility do not wish to be labelled as soft on crime, and actively seek to avoid such accusations by supporting increasingly punitive measures against offenders.One of the reasons why restorative justice has attracted only limited acceptance in the world of adult criminal justice is that it is perceived as a less punitive response to offending than the more traditional retributive punishment mode or its ‘justice model’ desert-based counterpart. In the span of this article I shall attempt to describe how, with a respectable measure of bifurcation, a model of reparative and restorative justice can be presented as a viable and optimistic alternative to the penal politics of retributive punishment and social protection. That it might bring with it the potential for reduced use of custody will be left to the reader to decide.