In prisons, participatory mechanisms can foster important outcomes including fairness, legitimacy and dignity. Complaints are one significant (symbolic) mechanism facilitating prisoner participation. Ombud institutions/Ombudsmen handle complaints externally, providing unelected accountability mechanisms and overseeing prisons around the world. A fair complaints process can stimulate prisoner voice, agency and rights protection, potentially averting self-harm and violence, and facilitating systemic improvements. However, complaints mechanisms are little studied. Addressing this gap, we: i) contextualise discussion by demonstrating that prisoners' actions have directly shaped complaints mechanisms available today; ii) outline prison complaints mechanisms in the case study jurisdiction of England and Wales; and iii) provide a critical review of literature to assess whether prison complaints systems are, in practice, participatory, inclusive and fair? We conclude that complaints mechanisms hold clear potential to enhance prison legitimacy, facilitate prisoner engagement and agency, and improve wellbeing and safety. However, myriad barriers prevent prisoners from participating in complaints processes, including culture, fear, accessibility, timeliness, emotional repression, and bureaucracy. The process of complaining and experiences of these barriers are uneven across different groups of prisoners. Our article provides a springboard for future empirical research.

Research on risk assessment for domestic abuse has focused primarily on the predictive validity of specific tools; less attention has been paid to implementation of risk tools by practitioners. This paper presents findings from a mixed methods study in England and Wales. Multi-level modelling reveals an 'officer effect' whereby victims' responses to the Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Harassment and Honour-Based Violence (DASH) risk assessment are influenced by the specific officer that completes the assessment. Specifically, this officer effect is strongest in relation to questions intended to capture elements of controlling and coercive behaviour, and least apparent in relation to identifying physical injuries. We further present findings from field observations and interviews with first response officers that corroborate and help explain the officer effect. We discuss implications for the design of primary risk assessments, victim safeguarding, and the use of police data for predictive modelling.

To compare the observed and forecasted crime trends in Barcelona, using crime statistics from January 2018 to March 2021.

The advent of COVID-19 prompted the enforced isolation of elderly and vulnerable populations around the world, for their own safety. For people in prison, these restrictions risked compounding the isolation and harm they experienced. At the same time, the pandemic created barriers to prison oversight when it was most needed to ensure that the state upheld the rights and wellbeing of those in custody. This article reports findings from a unique collaboration in Ireland between the Office of the Inspector of Prisons - a national prison oversight body - and academic criminologists. Early in the pandemic, they cooperated to hear the voices of people 'cocooning' - isolated because of their advanced age or a medical vulnerability - in Irish prisons by providing journals to this cohort, analysing the data, and encouraging the Irish Prison Service to change practices accordingly. The findings indicated that 'cocooners' were initially ambivalent about these new restrictions, both experiencing them as a punishment akin to solitary confinement, and understanding the goal of protection. As time passed, however, participants reported a drastic impact on their mental and physical health, and implications for their (already limited) agency and relationships with others, experienced more or less severely depending on staff and management practices. The paper also discusses the implications for prison practices during and following the pandemic, understanding isolation in the penological context, and collaboration between prison oversight bodies and academics.

Most studies on politico-ideological violence (PIV) recognize the importance of socio-political and economic grievances, but they rarely analyse them in depth. I argue that this is symptomatic of a tendency of depoliticization in radicalization research in the post 9/11 context and suggest that the study of PIV may benefit from putting greater emphasis on the element of grievance. A grievance-based analysis allows for critical and reflexive consideration of structural and systemic factors pertinent for engagement in PIV and may thereby contribute to demystifying and re-politicizing the current debate on PIV. I propose three 'ideal types' of grievances (racial, ethnic and religious; socio-economic; political), which may be locally or globally oriented or inspired, and suggest that a combination of those is likely to be present in most forms of PIV. I conclude with a few methodological reflections and potential implications for policymaking.

This study provides an overview of homicide clearance in four West European countries: Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Using data from the European Homicide Monitor, employing similar definitions and uniform coding schemes, this study allowed for unique cross-country comparisons in factors influencing differences in homicide clearance rates. Findings based on homicides occurring in the period 2009-14 revealed overall low homicide rates in all countries, with a wide variety in homicide clearance rates, ranging from 77 percent in the Netherlands to 98 percent in Finland. Results further showed that both event-based as well as victim-based characteristics significantly influenced the likelihood of homicide clearance, suggesting that homicide clearance rates can, for a large part, be attributed to the prevalent types of homicide in each of these European countries.

This paper presents a study of Street Pastors in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. Street Pastors are Christian volunteers who look after vulnerable people in the night-time economy. In this manner, they provide through empathy and care. The motives of Street Pastors for engaging with partygoers are multi-layered, but their personal faith appears to be a key explanation. A certain kind of orthodox - of being safe in, and saved by, a higher power - gives the pastors their strength to go out on the street, face the unknown and feel compassion for their fellow citizens. As such, both 'securitas' and 'certitudo' highlight positive (that is, constitutive) connotations of safety and security not commonly heard in the criminological literature.

Examining annual variation in the age-crime curve as a way to better understand the recent crime drop, this paper explores how the age distribution of convicted offending changed for men and women in Scotland between 1989 and 2011. This analysis employs shaded contour plots as a method of visualizing annual change in the age-crime curve. Similar to recent findings from the USA, we observed falling rates of convicted offending for young people, primarily owing to lower rates of convicted offending for young men. In contrast to the US literature we also find increases in the rate of convicted offending for those in their mid-twenties to mid-forties, which are relatively greater for women than men. Analysis of annual change shows different phases in the progression of these trends, with falls in prevalence during the 1990s reflecting lower rates of convictions for acquisitive crime, but falls between 2007 and 2011 being spread across multiple crime types. Explanations of the crime drop in Scotland and elsewhere must be able to account for different patterns of change across age, sex, crime type and time.

This article looks at how global flows of people and policies affect penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania. Those who had previously been incarcerated abroad perceive their punishment in Lithuania's reforming penal system in comparative terms. We find that international prison experience may either diminish or increase the sense of the severity of the current punishment. Respondents often felt more comfortable in a familiar culture of punishment in Lithuania that emphasizes autonomy and communality. Moreover, internationalized prisoners perceive prison reform emulating West European models as a threat to this culture and are able to articulate comparative critiques of this reform and contest its effects.

The overall purpose of this study is to contribute to bridging the gap between people- and place-oriented approaches in the study of crime causation. To achieve this we will explore some core hypotheses derived from Situational Action Theory about what makes young people crime prone and makes places criminogenic, and about the interaction between crime propensity and criminogenic exposure predicting crime events. We will also calculate the expected reduction in aggregate levels of crime that will occur as a result of successful interventions targeting crime propensity and criminogenic exposure. To test the hypotheses we will utilize a unique set of space-time budget, small area community survey, land-use and interviewer-led questionnaire data from the prospective longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) and an artificial neural network approach to modelling. The results show that people's crime propensity (based on their personal morals and abilities to exercise self-control) has the bulk of predictive power, but also that including criminogenic exposure (being unsupervised with peers and engaged in unstructured activities in residential areas of poor collective efficacy or commercial centres) demonstrates a substantial increase in predictive power (in addition to crime propensity). Moreover, the results show that the probability of crime is strongest when a crime-prone person is in a criminogenic setting and, crucially, that the higher a person's crime propensity the more vulnerable he or she is to influences of criminogenic exposure. Finally, the findings suggest that a reduction in people's crime propensity has a much bigger impact on their crime involvement than a reduction in their exposure to criminogenic settings.

This article examines how friends' involvement in crime influences such involvement in those around them, as offenders or victims, and the extent to which such friendship effects vary with contact frequency, friendship intimacy, and geographical proximity. To test our hypotheses we used four waves from the Dutch panel survey CrimeNL, which includes ego-centered network measures in each wave for respondents aged between 16 and 45. To test our hypotheses, fixed-effects panel models were employed. The results show that living in close proximity to delinquent friends increases people's own risk of offending, and daily interaction with these friends decreases the risk of victimization. Victimization is also communicated among friends in their daily interactions. These findings stress the need to consider factors that condition how friendships exert influence on the risk of crime involvement.

This article aims at analysing the differences between European countries in the obstacles ex-offenders face due to having a criminal record. First, a comparative analytical framework is introduced that takes into account all the different elements that can lead to exclusion from the labour market by the dissemination of criminal record information. This model brings together social norms (macro level), social actors (meso level) and individual choices (micro level) in the same framework. Secondly, this model is used to compare the different impact of having a criminal record in Spain and the Netherlands. This comparison highlights three important findings: (1) the difference between norms of transparency/privacy and inclusive/exclusive ideals, (2) the significant role of social control agents, such as probation agencies and the ex-offenders' social network, in shaping the opportunities that they have, and (3) self-exclusion seems to be a key mechanism for understanding unsuccessful re-entry into the labour market.

This study describes the criminal careers of offenders convicted of fraud, distinguishing different career dimensions such as intermittency, versatility and specialization. Results indicate that most fraud offenders are versatile in the sense that they also have significant criminal records for other serious offending (that is, not fraud). At the same time they are also specialized in fraud. When we examine developmental trajectories of serious offending and next explore patterns of fraud for the groups identified, we find that offenders in our sample represent a heterogeneous group and that the classic divide between typical financial (for example, white-collar) offenders and common criminals does not apply to the majority of our sample.

Countries that rely on natural resource rents (that is, the revenue generated from the sale of natural resources) may suffer from a variety of social problems. This exploratory study reviews the natural resource extraction literature to derive a 'natural resource rents-homicide' hypothesis. Data for 173 countries for the years 2000 to 2012 are examined to determine if there is a correlation between natural resource rents and homicide rates. Multilevel growth models suggest that natural resource rents are positively correlated with homicide rates within countries (level 1) but not between them (level 2). Importantly, the correlation between natural resource rents and homicide is strongest when natural resource rents are lagged. We conclude by suggesting that increasing natural resource rents may be counterproductive over the long run and sow the seeds for a future increase in homicide.

Social control theory links being employed with reduced criminal behaviour. In particular, the indirect social control generated by the perceived benefits of the current job are expected to underlie the work-crime association. Features specific to the emerging adult period, however, call into question the strength of the work-crime association during this new life stage. This study uses data from the Utrecht Study of Adolescent Development (USAD), a longitudinal self-report study among 669 men and women aged 18 to 24 at the start of the study to examine the extent to which working a paid job is associated with reduced levels of delinquency and crime, and the extent to which this association is conditional on individual job perceptions. We also test for gender differences in these associations. Results indicate that for men - but not for women - paid work is associated with lower levels of delinquency and crime, but only from age 24 onwards.

People's reactions to offenders and victims of crime follow different rationales. Whereas the punishment of the offender is primarily determined by the severity of the crime (which includes its foreseeable harmful consequences), the actual harm that is experienced by the victim drives the need for his or her support and assistance. With the introduction of the Victim Impact Statement (VIS), in which victims are allowed to express the (harmful) consequences of the crime on their lives, the question is raised whether allowing such victim input during criminal proceedings would influence the offender's sentence. The main goal of the current research is to disentangle how a crime's wrongfulness and harmfulness influence people's reactions to offenders and victims. We show that, whereas people's perceptions of the offender (and the outcome of the trial) are influenced by the severity of the crime, people's judgements related to the victim are more likely to be influenced by an interaction between the severity of the crime and the experienced harm of the crime. That is, in this study no support was found for the argument that the delivery of a VIS would lead to a violation of the proportionality principle.

This paper aims to take a holistic approach to studying fear of crime by testing predictors at multiple levels of analyses. Data from the European Social Survey ( = 56,752 from 29 countries) were used to test and extend the Income Inequality and Sense of Vulnerability Hypotheses. The findings confirm that (1) individuals in societies with greater income inequalities are more fearful of crime, and (2) older or disabled people as well as women report greater fear of crime. Contrary to the hypotheses, ethnic and not ethnic minority members report greater fear of crime, if they reside in high income inequality countries. It is further demonstrated that fear of crime explains the inverse association between income inequality and subjective well-being in this particular subsample.

Internal borders are a major but understudied site of crimmigration as most scholarship has focused on external borders (Van der Woude and Van Berlo, 2015). Internal borders were supposed to disappear under the principle of free movement within the European Union. But today we see EU member states policing the borders inside Schengen, checking identification, verifying passage, and regulating mobility in so-called 'gray zones'. This article investigates this type of policing within the EU, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. It argues that the policing of internal borders is highly dependent upon discretionary power, a significant factor in the crimmigration process that we do not know enough about. Following Hawkins (1992, 2003), Schneider (1992), and Bushway and Forst (2013) on discretion and discretionary decision-making, we examine the interaction between decisions by law-makers and policy-makers that create discretionary space for law enforcement officials on the ground, and the way in which these street-level bureaucrats perceive the discretionary space attributed to them. By zeroing in on the interaction between these two actors, we aim to find the discretionary decision that matters the most in terms of explaining the crimmigration practices, offering a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach to border control. We discuss the implications of this power and the consequences for the European Project as such.

In this article we examine whether the proposal to criminalize illegal stay in the Netherlands was preceded by increased negative media attention for unauthorized immigrants. Using a corpus linguistics approach, we carried out a quantitative discourse analysis of all newspaper articles on unauthorized migrants over a period of 15 years. Our results show that the amount of media coverage actually strongly decreased in the years before the proposal, and this coverage was moreover increasingly less negative. This study thus nuances the somewhat popular belief that unauthorized migrants are increasingly portrayed in negative ways and shows that the framing of migrants as criminals is a more diffuse process in which the media seem to follow rather than fuel politics and policy.

In this article I argue that there has been a change in the dynamics of riots in the Netherlands from the escalated political protests of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to public disturbances in disadvantaged neighbourhoods that lack a clearly articulated political component in the last two decades. This article examines the societal reactions such recent 'riots' evoke and the means by which the demarcated autonomous and exogenous groups are designated as 'the rioters' through a process of 'Othering'. It examines the 2007 'Slotervaart riot' as an exemplary case of such recent 'riots' in the Netherlands. It concludes that placing the focus on demarcated groups of during recent 'riots' in the Netherlands allowed broader social problems to be placed outside the 'normal' or 'pure' societal body.