Measures to combat international crime include customer identity controls by banks and repressive measures against informal money transfer systems. While there is debate surrounding the latter strategy, customer identity controls are largely taken for granted in the Netherlands. The author argues that these controls can negatively affect migrants. Moreover, exclusion of migrants from regulated banking systems has development implications. Phone-based remittances, that are linked to the regulated banking system, could serve as an alternative for informal transfer systems. Too stringent identity controls in host countries seem to prevent this however. The author recommends that controls focus on the amount being transferred, rather than on the person making the transfer.

Immigration detention is formally not a punishment, but governments do seem to use it to deter irregular migrants from staying in the territory. This study explores whether and how practices of immigration detention in the Netherlands affect detainees’ decision-making processes regarding return and result in ‘specific deterrence’. 81 unauthorized irregular migrants were interviewed in immigration detention and their casefiles were examined. We find evidence for a limited deterrence effect: a minority of the respondents indeed wanted to return to their countries of origin in order to end their (repeated) stay in immigration detention. For some respondents the detention experience contributed to a desire to migrate from the Netherlands to a different European country. We go into the relevance of these findings for the continuing societal debate on the use of immigration detention.

This article reflects on some of the qualities and strengths, as well as some potential weaknesses, of a research methodology used to study ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, such as the undocumented. This approach, known as the PEER (Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation and Research) approach, is introduced in terms of its key elements of trust, anonymity, in-depth data and flexibility. Its suitability for sensitive, or ‘liminal’ research issues, involving groups of vulnerable informants, is explained. The method is based on relations of trust, which are maintained through anonymity in data collection, and extend from social researchers to informants, through the intermediation of trained community-based peer researchers. It is they who interview others in their own social networks; since trust is the key ingredient in making this ethically-informed methodology work well, trust must be invested also in the peer researchers, who form part of the research team.

On the basis of article 1F Refugee Convention alleged perpetrators of serious crimes can be excluded from refugee protection. Under certain circumstances this exclusion can be regarded a unique type of contemporary banishment and branding. The rationale to exclude is primarily motivated by moral arguments, rather than security related arguments. In case Dutch government cannot deport the excluded persons, the exclusion is not limited to a certain place but (de facto) universal in nature. When the banished alleged perpetrators are declared undesirable aliens they are ‘branded’ as actual perpetrators.

The current phase in which Dutch government increasingly criminalizes the illegal residence of migrants is simultaneously characterized by decreasing numbers of illegal migrants in this country. In the process of crimmigration, some newly developed policies indirectly influence daily lives of specific groups of illegal migrants while other policies and laws more directly try to hinder illegal stay. These policies that aim to exclude and ban illegal migrants are continued even though they are increasingly criticized by academics and divergent (inter)national actors. These policies and laws can be contradictory, sometimes conflict with international treaties, and lead to unforeseen and undesirable outcomes in which human dignity is challenged.

David Brotherton – professor of Sociology at John Jay College of the City University of New York – was named Critical Criminologist of the year in 2011 and is known for his work on the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation and his research on Dominican deportees. By using excerpts of a lengthy interview with Brotherton, a personal and detailed account is presented which sheds light on the roots of his work, his (scientific) influences and especially his highly engaged methods of critical ethnography.

This column reacts to the use of the word ‘Djuka’ (spelled variously) for the Suriname Maroons. This word, although derived from the perfectly respectable tribal name of Ndyuka, is widely considered today as a term of abuse and interpreted to mean ‘shit of the Jews’. It has therefore become unusable in serious literature.

This article discusses David van Reybrouck’s history of Congo. The focus is on violence and there is special attention for the period of the Congo Free State, 1885-1908, under king Leopold. A comparison is made between Van Reybrouck’s views and those of Adam Hochchild. It is concluded that the former passes a milder judgment on the actions of Leopold’s troops than the latter, while he also presents a more diversified account. Both authors, however, reject the label of genocide for Leopold’s ‘rubber terror’. The article concludes with some reflections on the concept of genocide, proposing to replace it with organized murder.

In the Netherlands penal interventions aimed at the reduction of recidivism are progressively executed according to the ‘what works’ approach, a research tradition that tries to articulate the conditions under which penal interventions can be effective in preventing offenders to relapse into crime. The ideas on ‘what works’ originate from international studies, but what about the Dutch research itself? Which interventions have proved to be successful in the Netherlands and which have had adverse results? The WODC has carried out a meta-analysis of all relevant studies that have been published in the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium since the early seventies of the previous century. 141 evaluations were identified, 83 of which contained some sort of comparison with a control group. Results indicate that programmes aimed at adult offenders were more successful than interventions for youth and young adults. Programmes based on the idea of rehabilitation appeared to have been more successful than sanctions based on deterrence.

Based on qualitative research within Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands, the authors describe and discuss (informal) labour relations among Chinese restaurant owners and their illegal Chinese workers. It is argued that a too one-sided emphasis on interpreting these labour relations in terms of ‘labour exploitation’ reduces employers to offenders and employees to victims. Such a judicial perspective hinders a clear view on the causes of underlying themes as illegal labour and illegal stay. The authors discuss how restaurant owners and employees operate in a ‘moral economy’ in which a demand for cheap products and flexible, motivated, cheap, and capable labour interacts with culturally shared expectations on justice and reciprocity and influences labour relations.