De Dienstenrichtlijn bevat een opmerkelijke wetgevingshypothese voor het omgevingsrecht: dat schaarse vergunningen in het bijzonder geschikt zijn voor het management van schaarse natuurlijke hulpbronnen en dat deze door een selectie tussen gegadigden verdeeld moeten worden. Wat maakt schaarse vergunningen voor natuurlijke schaarste zo bijzonder? Deze bijdrage verkent deze hypothese in het licht van de economische theorie en een analyse van de betekenis van schaarste voor publieke rechten. Het resultaat is een economische blik op het omgevingsrecht en enkele reflecties op de rechtsontwikkeling van schaarse publieke rechten.

On 1 April 2014, the Dutch Act on Adolescent Criminal Law entered into force. With this law, the age limit in article 77c of the Criminal Code, which allows for the application of juvenile criminal law to young adults, was stretched from 21 to 23 years. In this article stock is taken of the developments that have taken place in the four years after the introduction of this law. In practice, article 77c Criminal Code is increasingly being applied in case of young adult suspects, however still to a little extent. Among others, this has to do with confusion about the target group that qualifies for the adolescent criminal law. The access to and justification for the application of the law show a very diverse picture.

The apologies offered by young offenders in restorative justice conferences are often of poor quality. In this article the difficulties that accompany the offering of excuses are discussed. Offenders sometimes lack the language skills to pronounce an adequate apology, are anxious or insecure or believe that they have not been treated fairly. The mediation setting itself also has effects: sometimes perpetrators feel intimidated and feel compelled to say something that resembles an excuse. A related problem is that the perceptions about the sincerity of the apology can vary considerably. This perception-mismatch also occurs among victims: what one victim considers sincere is ‘fake’ for another. Many people
– also advocates of restorative justice – trust that the offender will offer a sincere apology, without realizing that this is not self-evident in a thorny confrontation setting. This article aims to temper this sincerity-expectation.

The Halt-intervention is an extra-judicial intervention for young people who have committed a minor offense. This article zooms in on the results of a literature review concerning the efficacy of offering an apology, one of the core elements of the Halt-intervention. Offering an apology leads to more insight into the consequences of their behavior and it increases the sense of moral norms. Shame and guilt play a crucial role in this process. The effect of the excuse can be increased by good mediation between perpetrator and victim, good preparation of the conversation, and the drafting of a contract. These instructions can also be applied when offering an apology in other interventions.

In recent years, there are signs that young people with a (mild) intellectual disability are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. It turns out that especially a large majority of the repeated offenders have an intellectual disability. Therefore it would be relevant to know whether and when an intellectual disability is recognized by professionals in the criminal procedure. What is the impact of not recognizing the specific disability on the offender in the criminal justice procedure and on recidivism? The author focuses on a rather new accelerated out-of-court settlement of criminal cases, the so-called ZSM method. She concludes that the high speed of this procedure increases the vulnerability of suspects with a (mild) intellectual disability, especially because the various professionals involved in this procedure seem to lack substantial awareness of the problem. This situation increases the risk of false confessions and witnessing and might also contribute to recidivism.

Restorative justice has evolved from an unknown concept towards a model that is considered world-wide when it comes to changes in the penal and youth justice sector. The restorative model expands towards handling conflicts in other areas, such as neighbourhoods, business, welfare issues, family matters and behavioural problems in schools. This article deals with the latter. Restorative practices are based upon an open and respectful dialogue, which presupposes certain attitudes and capacities. The article looks into possible risks, but especially the chances restorative practices in schools can offer for socially vulnerable youth.

This article describes the context of this thematic issue on restorative practices in schools. In 2016, KU Leuven performed an explorative research named “Field Glasses”. The research dealt with similarities and differences between restorative justice in the penal context on the one hand, and the domains of community building, adult education and schools on the other hand (Deboeck e.a., 2017). Literature has been studied and actors of both practice and policy-making have been interviewed. This article describes some of the main findings with regard to restorative practices and schools.

Since 2008 juvenile crime rates in the Netherlands annually decreased. The decrease is shown in official police and justice crime, as well as in self-reported delinquency. However, this crime drop mainly accounts traditional offline crime, whereas little is known about cybercrime amongst juveniles and young adults. According to the Juvenile Crime Monitor, approximately 20% of juveniles and young adults report involvement in cyber or digitized delinquency. Trends with regard to cyber or digitized crime are not (yet) available. Previous research indicates that multiple factors are responsible for the crime drop amongst juveniles. These explanations mainly regard to offline factors and are primarily focused on traditional offline crime. In this article the increased use of social media is also discussed as a potential explanation.

In the field of restorative justice (RJ), relatively much is known about victims’ reasons for wanting to participate in either mediation (as part of the criminal process) or victim-offender contact (parallel to the criminal process). Much less is known, however, about why victims refuse to take part in RJ services. The current article sheds light on this issue and is based on a joint exploratory research initiative by Victim in Focus and Victim Support the Netherlands. The results indicate that participation in mediation and victim-offender contact is significantly associated with the type of offense. Victims of traffic accidents participate significantly less often in mediation than victims of other offenses. In case of victim-offender contact, victims of violent crimes participate significantly less often while victims of traffic accidents participate more often than victims of other crimes. In addition, the referrer of the case and the victim’s age are also significantly associated with participation in victim-offender contact. When a case was referred through the judicial stakeholders, victims more often did not participate, whereas when victims registered themselves, it more often led to a form of victim-offender contact. With regard to age, victims younger than 25 were significantly less often willing to participate than older victims. The specific reasons victims mention for not wanting to participate in RJ are twofold: both emotional and pragmatic reasons are mentioned. The latter were most common with regard to both mediation and victim-offender contact: victims primarily wonder ‘what’s in it for me?’ and seem to base their decision on whether to partake in RJ on its answer. Mentioning emotional reasons not to participate was in case of victim-offender contact significantly associated with judicial referrers of the case, while such reasons were less mentioned when a case was referred through victim support in The Netherlands. To further explore these associations, more research is needed.

The phenomenon of victim participation in restorative justice (RJ) has been studied from two main angles: describing victims’ motivations to take part in RJ and studying the benefits that different groups of victims may obtain when participating in RJ. However, methodological limitations of former studies have impeded to offer conclusive answers to the question ‘for whom is RJ’. This article offers insights into these issues, focusing on the descriptive findings of a mixed-method study carried out in the context of victim-offender mediation (in Spain and Belgium) and assessed before the encounter (if any) took place. Findings suggest that, before mediation, victims’ personal characteristics tend to differ. The factor ‘victim-offender relationship’ also appeared as an important variable. Implications of these findings are discussed.

In the traditional understanding of police culture as well as in the criticism against the use of the concept of ‘police culture’, not much attention has been paid towards the influence of the representation of police work and crime in the media. Although since the pioneering studies in the sixties and seventies of the last century it has been made clear that police work is not limited to dealing with crime and criminal justice, the mass media for decades have presented a completely different image: one of thrill seeking and hardcore action. Police officers themselves tend to ‘sensationalize’ their work. Police culture is no longer understood as a deterministic coping mechanism, but is rooted in active and constructive participation of police officers. As a consequence we must pay attention to representation of ‘the police’ by the media and ask ourselves how identity work by police officers is influenced by the representation of crime and the police in the (new) media.

Findings of empirical research may have direct or indirect relevance to legal practice and policy. This article investigates the relevance of findings from both research in sociology of law and legal psychology and law for legal practice and policy. It then discusses an empirical study in the Netherlands among scholars from these two disciplines into actual use in practice of empirical findings. A distinction is made between direct and indirect application of empirical findings. Both a survey and face-to-face interviews have been conducted. Findings suggest that, although the criminal justice system and policymakers do apply empirical knowledge to a certain degree, the actual use of empirical results seems defective.

Liability insurances shift the financial risk of the loss of a damage from the person who is liable for the damage to the liability insurer. To avoid negligent behavior of the insured, the insurer provides different prevention tools in the insurance policy. The insurer will attach certain sanctions or rewards to certain behavior and certain circumstances in the general conditions of the insurance contract. This research raises the question of the effectiveness of these instruments. The hypothesis is that without knowledge of the insured of these sanctions or rewards, these sanctions and rewards will not form an additional incentive for careful behavior and they will have no preventive effect. Additionally, these prevention tools may undermine the protection of the insured. For this reason the legislature has limited the freedom of contract. This study examines the extent to which the legislature has limited the possibilities of the insurer to provide in prevention tools in de insurance policy. It assesses the extent to which the legislature may or may not succeed in its purpose to protect the insured, and on the other hand, where there are still possibilities for the insurer to fulfill its prevention task.