In this essay the authors argue that social and genetic explanations for behavior are intertwined, and that genetically informed research designs can be a valuable addition to the toolbox that is available to criminologists for examining causal relationships and intergenerational transmission. From this ‘toolbox’ perspective, the authors discuss four study approaches: twin and family designs, genome-wide association studies, polygenetic scores and Mendelian Randomization. Finally, they address a number of practical considerations for applying genetically informed research designs in criminology.

This essay is a scientific reflection on Leuven Restorative City (LRC). The cities, which present themselves as ‘restorative cities’, aim to ensure that restoration continues to nestle in the capillaries of our society. The article argues that realizing the LRC-promise requires restorative thinking through the meso-level of local public life. This involves reference to a number of notions that can be traced back to Ancient Greek thought in Athens, in which the intellectual virtue of ­phronesis – practical wisdom in a social and political context – is central. Citizens are seen as allies in the solution of social issues. LRC contributes to this through its focus on ‘turning conflict into opportunities’. Restorative justice wisdom is more widely applicable in society. However, the LRC process can sometimes be erratic and unpredict­able. The article points to the possible alternation of good and bad periods, and puts forward the expectation that the development of restorative practices in Leuven can be understood as cascades. In these cascades, the course of the diffusion of restorative practices is presented in terms of successive waves of learning experi­ences and knowledge sharing.

It has been proposed that when people perceive their treatment by criminal justice actors as more procedurally just, they will be more likely to comply with the law. Existing research mainly focused on the police or the judge. This longitudinal study examined how prisoners experienced their treatment by five different criminal justice actors using data from the Prison Project. The prisoners were most positive about the procedurally fair treatment by their lawyer and least positive about the treatment by the police. Additionally, the perceived treatment by the police was associated with the treatment by other actors at subsequent moments.

Climate litigation is an understudied phenomenon in criminology. In this article we will discuss the rise of climate change litigation and growing recognition of global environmental harms from a green criminological perspective. More specifically, we will discuss both the legal reasoning and the impact of the Urgenda case in the Netherlands in the context of environmental, ecological and climate justice. We will conclude with how this case contributes for the recognition of diverse climate victims and strengthening of climate justice in the near future.

This article analyzes the opinion of twenty-four Surinamese ex-convicted young men on restorative justice. The results were obtained through four focus group sessions and a concise survey form. The factors (a) type of offense, (b) seriousness of offense and (c) prevention of recurrence were discussed. The opinions are divided, but the majority is of the opinion that restorative justice can mainly work for serious and violent crimes. Fear of revenge appears to be a barrier to participation. Employment has been indicated as the key to real recovery of the offender and prevention of recidivism (and thus satisfaction for the victim). The results provide insight into the susceptibility to restorative justice among this specific group in Suriname.

This qualitative study examines how criminal careers in cybercrime start and can be explained. Based on offender and expert interviews, the authors conclude that traditional factors linked with the initiation, such as a maturity gap (for juvenile offenders) and opportunism (for adult offenders), in combination with different types of (online) disinhibition – social, technical, situational and psychological – can explain the start of a criminal career. Features of the digital context appear to play a major role in the development of a criminal career and this requires more online supervision and education about – among other things – legal alternatives and the risks and boundaries of the online environment.

Prisoners often encounter multiple barriers when returning to society, resulting in higher risks of recidivism. To overcome these barriers, prison-based and community-based professionals assist with preparation for release. Prison-based professionals, such as the case manager and mentor, screen and monitor the problems regarding work and income, housing, healthcare, financial debts and valid identification. Community-based professionals, such as municipal officials, parole officers, healthcare professionals and volunteers, can provide additional and specialized help. First, this research discusses the current policy of the Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency (DJI) and the role of different types of professionals. Second, it presents a nationwide picture of the extent to which prisoners report contact with prison-based and community-based professionals, and to what degree prisoners appreciate this contact. The results are specified for various types of regimes and time served and are based on 4308 prisoner surveys of the Dutch Prison Visitation Study (DPVS), part of the Life in Custody Study (LIC-study). It turns out that most prisoners seem to be in close contact with prison-based professionals and that prisoners positively value this contact. However, contact with community-based professionals is limited and prisoners are somewhat dissatisfied about their contact with parole officers and municipal officials. Furthermore, the amount of contact differs across various types of regimes and time served. In particular, individuals who recently entered prison report less contact. To conclude, policy implications will be discussed.

In this study we examined the developmental trajectories of hackers, based on their self-reported web defacements. During a web defacement, the content of a website is altered without permission. In total, 50,330 defacements of websites with a Dutch extension (.nl websites) were analyzed, which were executed by 3,640 defacers between January 2010 and march 2017. Using trajectory analysis, six different groups of defacers could be distinguished: two chronic groups of attackers and four groups who only defaced websites during a limited time period. These groups also differed in their motivations and modus operandi. The high frequent chronic attackers consist of less than 2% of the hackers, but were responsible for more than half of all defacements. It would therefore be most efficient when future interventions focus on this small group of chronic offenders. For future studies it would be an interesting topic to examine the content of the web defacements.

Convict criminology draws from personal experience of imprisonment to offer critical criminological perspectives on punishment and prisons. In this article I discuss how some of these are aligned with questions of narrative and post-colonial perspectives in criminology. I use autoethnographic vignettes to communicate the experiences of imprisonment that inform the development of convict criminology, and I explore their relationship to narrative criminology’s interest in personal stories.

Throughout the last decade several cyclists have published memoirs in which they account for their doping use. In previous literature such autobiographical accounts have been characterized as attempts of fallen sports stars to sanitize their spoiled public image. In contrast, the analysis in this article will show that the accounts are of relevance when it comes to understanding the problem of doping in professional cycling. Their accounts break the omertà regarding doping, providing insights about the motivation and opportunity structures behind doping and how such structures are endemic to the system of professional cycling.

Hesdy Gerges is a heavyweight kickboxer whose career was interrupted because of his involvement in an cocaine transport. This article is analyzes the biography of this top fighter, describing the macro context of an expanding market for full-contact martial arts, the meso level of the gym and its relation to the criminal milieu, and the fighter and his body on the micro level. Hesdy is used to set an example, and since it takes more than seven years to reach a verdict, the impact on his private life and his career as a fighter is large. The study is based on participant observation and 33 interviews, twenty of which with the protagonist.

In this study we examine whether parental monitoring remains a protective factor in the lives of emerging adults, as well as the extent to which monitoring in other settings replaces the protective role of the parents. We use data collected for the TransAM project, a longitudinal survey of 970 emerging adults (18-24 years) to examine monitoring in a range of different contexts using an instrument based on Stattin and Kerr’s parental monitoring scale (2000). Results indicate that whilst parental control plays a protective role in the first years of emerging adulthood, we find no evidence that monitoring in other settings replaces the protective role of parents. However, monitoring of the self, i.e., self-control, has an increasingly strong relationship with delinquency during emerging adulthood.

The aim of this study was to provide more insight in prevalence and aetiology of juvenile frequent offending, employing police registered data as well as self-report information. We combined data about 519 youths that participated in a self-report study in the region of The Hague with police register data (the HKS system) from the police unit of The Hague. The results indicate that a substantial part of youths that report a large amount of offenses themselves are not formally known as ‘juvenile frequent offender’. Causal factors derived from four major criminological theories can be found in a more pronounced way among juvenile frequent offenders than among youths that incidentally commit offenses. In general, there are similarities between the characteristics of juvenile frequent offenders defined by police register data and those defined by self-reports, but, on average, frequent offenders that are known by the police spend more time unstructured socializing with friends. We conclude that research using the method of self-report is well capable to find juvenile frequent offenders, and that this method also leads to useful information about the causes of their delinquent behaviour.

Studies investigating peer influence on risk behaviors, such as antisocial behavior and substance abuse, mostly study the amount of change in which adolescents adapt their risk behavior to become more similar to their friends. Onset of risk behavior, changing form having no experience to having any experience with risk behavior, has been studies far less. This study investigates friends’ influence on the onset of risk behavior and their influence in changes in risk behavior. Hypotheses were tested using SNARE (Social Network Analysis of Risk behavior in Early adolescence) data (N=1.144), containing information on risk behavior (i.e. antisocial behavior, alcohol use, and tobacco use) and friendship networks at three timepoints during the first year of secondary education (M_age= 12.7; SD=0.47). Analyses, using longitudinal social network analysis (RSIENA), showed that although adolescents adapt their risk behavior to become more similar to their friends, they are not influence in by their friends in the onset of risk behavior. These findings suggest s more nuanced role of friends in the onset of risk behavior. Interventions aiming at friends might benefit from differentiating between the onset and further (dis)continuation of risk behavior as these friendship influence processes might be less relevant for the onset of risk behavior.

This article presents findings from a longitudinal study of 81 young recidivists examined over fifteen years. By the age of 25, 50 percent had desisted for at least three years. 60 percent had had no new police contacts during the last two years. Four stages could be distinguished in the desistance process. Apart from a small number of explicit persisters, all of the young adults did consciously consider whether the benefits of their criminal activities outweighed the disadvantages. With just a few exceptions, the decision to quit was not motivated by an altruistic goal, nor by extreme fear, but mainly motivated by the feeling of being too old for criminal life and by striving for a pleasant self-esteem. It is concluded that when young adult recidivists give up crime, this must be seen as an extreme and extremely late form of maturation.

The first part of this article presents three academic theories on radicalisation: Moghaddam’s staircase model of radicalisation, Galtung’s typology of violence (direct, structural and cultural violence), and Staub’s psycho-educative approach. The core of Staub’s approach is that in conflict periods, people can be psychologically manipulated through their own fears, insecurities and unresolved traumas. Therefore, psycho-education and the empowerment of people are highly necessary to stimulate citizens to function as active bystanders when they are confronted with wrongdoing. In the second part of this article some promising approaches are pres­en‍ted which might increase personal and social resilience. The role of narratives in understanding experiences and changing identities is discussed. Radio La Benevolencija in Rwanda uses the power of storytel­l‍ing to stimulate resilience among the population. In the concluding paragraph a two-pronged strategy on radicalization is presented. This positive criminological perspective aims to promote active bystandership, participation and resilience.

This article relates criminological research on youth delinquency to the social development of adolescents. Starting point is a goal-framing approach which assumes that young people aim for the achievement of two goals: status (‘getting ahead’) and belonging (‘getting along’). Peers form an important context for achieving these goals. Therefore, the role of delinquency in peer networks is examined: on the one hand, the extent to which delinquency contributes to peer status, and on the other hand, how delinquency contributes to the formation of network relationships and, vice versa, how network relationships influence adolescents’ delinquency. Finally, several directions for further research are discussed.

For social scientists undertaking critical research on elites in organisational contexts securing access is a challenging exercise that may rely on the use of several access strategies over extended periods. This process is further complicated by the existence of research ethics frameworks that establish boundaries to access strategies, posing dilemmas on how to best balance access needs with a commitment to ethical practices. This article focuses on such dilemmas – or the ‘ethics of access’ – through a reflection on PhD fieldwork during 2016-2017 in Luxembourg spent researching the European Investment Bank. The paper will conclude by calling for an overhaul of existing frameworks in order to foster more research on elites.

Attempting to understand the Greek narrative of crisis, this paper examines the most prominent forms of violence that emerged in the period of acute economic recession and political upheaval in Greece namely structural, institutional and anti-institutional violence. This paper aims to highlight existing theoretical gaps and avoid common fallacies of the current body of knowledge. In contrast to some of the more common features of the discussion on violence, this note sets out to: a) acknowledge that violence is not necessarily a physical act, b) acknowledge that the outcomes of violence performances might not be physical either, c) specify and adequately distinguish agency and structural dynamics and d) address the cultural and contextual aspects of violence. Vital to this endeavor is to acknowledge, identify and understand the interactive relation between different forms of violence that emerge during the same period of time in a context in which conflict escalates.

In this contribution, I describe several key developments that have been fundamental to the development of criminology in the past 50 years. Next, I sketch the contours of several more recent developments, paying particular attention to three technologies, virtual reality, smartphones and wearables that will leave their imprint on the field. These developments will also imply a shift from the study of criminality to researching criminal behaviour.