In this interview, Lode Walgrave talks to John Braithwaite, one of the most cited white collar crime scholars and best known for his ‘reintegrative shaming’, which added the crucial moral-emotional and ethical dimensions to the body of work on crime and crime control. John Braithwaite tells about his major publications and developments in his intellectual endeavour: the role of shaming and its importance in restorative justice, dominion, responsive regulation, and also his recent project on peacebuilding. Braithwaite’s career and political involvement are discussed throughout the interview, as well as his critical view with regards to the fragmentation of social sciences (including criminology).

In this article I focus on the academic environment in which social psychologist Diederik Stapel worked and developed his career as a con academic. He published over 50 articles with fabricated data in top tier journals. This article is based on interviews with Stapel himself and document analysis. Especially, I pay attention to his socialization as an academic in his years at the University of Amsterdam, where he did his PhD (1986-2000). In my description of how social psychology developed in the nineties in Amsterdam it becomes clear that there was a strong emphasis on competition and publishing articles in top tier journals. Stapel conformed to this culture of competition and published almost as much as the two leading full professors of his department during the period 1995-2000. In the early nineties Stapel discovered that the use of questionable research procedures (QRPs) was common in social psychology. He realized that without using these procedures it was hardly possible to get good results and publish frequently in top tier journals. Though Stapel resented this partly and was disenchanted by this experience, he did integrate QRPs in his daily academic practice. He actually raised the issue of QRPs in a lecture in Oxford when he received the Jos Jaspars Early Career Award of the EAESP, but there was hardly any substantive response to his presentation. The academic culture in which Stapel developed his career can be described as ‘indifferent tolerant’. Though Stapel does refer to the circumstances which influenced his academic fraud, he does state that he himself is responsible for his massive scientific misconduct.

Scientific misconduct takes place at the heart of higher education organizations. Organizational culture (meso level) shapes scholars’ behaviors and perceptions (micro level) about what should be problematized while conducting research and teaching. In this paper it is argued that there are organizational mechanisms at place by which organizational goals (funding) and professional goals (recognition) become indistinguishable. The mechanisms are: pressure, loose social control, scarce resources and lack of alternatives. Scholars may strategically react to these mechanisms by accepting, fitting in, resisting or giving up. It is at the heart of these mechanisms and strategies that problematic behaviors may emerge.

In this article the authors focus upon the measures taken as a reaction against scientific fraud against the background of the contemporary science policy that turns the practice of science into a knowledge economy. In the light of the availability but obvious underuse of reactive legal means, they question the recourse to proactive ethical control and regulation of the scientific activities. They contend that such science policy is not so much the expression of a reaction against exceptional cases of scientific fraud, than of an endeavour to discipline and control scientist to the constraints of the knowledge economy. For the authors, however, the latter is the problem to be solved: another science policy is needed.

The author points out that tribunals against war criminals are characterized by investigations of the broader military and social developments. By outlining the historical context of the violence the public is in a better position to make informed and balanced judgments. Criminal tribunals have a communicative character and great educational potential; they make clear why the Great Evil cannot be accepted and has to be punished.

The recent exhibition The Crime Was Almost Perfect in the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, curated by Cristina Ricupero, focused on the dynamic relation between art (aesthetics) and crime (ethics). The review discusses the representations of crime in (some of) the exhibited art works and analyzes the ways in which the artists play with their (conflicting) meanings, ambivalences and ambiguities.

Life of a Hunter (c.1647) is an extraordinary painting by the young Dutch artist Paulus Potter. Its fourteen panels tell the tale of a well-heeled gentleman who likes to hunt and to kill “game” and “exotic” animals. The hunting world is turned upside down when the animals capture the hunter and put him on trial. He is condemned to death, roasted alive and doubtless consumed by the very creatures who had earlier been his quarry. In this essay we try to interpret Potter’s painting. Is it an allegory of the chaotic politics of the mid-17th century Dutch Republic? Does it represent an early modern animal trial? Our tentative conclusion is that Life of a Hunter expresses a Montaignian-inspired moment of transition in cultural attitudes towards human-animal relationships: its restricted vision of animal cruelty is not against animal cruelty tout court and its inversion of two links in the great chain of being is very far from being altogether pro-animal.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the process of rupture in Brazilian graffiti writer’s subculture resulting in different groups - pichadores, pixadores and grafiteiros - took place in two different, though complementary, stages. The first stage is the commodification of graffiti by successive media campaigns and its penal control by the state. The second stage - which may be considered as a side effect of the first one - consists of the emergence of a new transgressive pixação movement. Instead of merely writing or tagging their signatures and messages on the walls of the city, they claim the freedom of usage of the urban space and contest the importance that property has in the late modernity context.

In the introduction of the special issue of the Journal on Crime & Culture on ‘Resistance’, the editors focus on the theoretical history of the concept of resistance in the field of Criminology. Against the background of the Birmingham School and the themes and ideas of Critical Criminology, the authors argue that new issues are rebelled against, and new styles and rituals become en vogue. The street fighting man on the barricades is no longer the obvious icon, and resistance is not per se intergenerational, interclass or a confrontation between minorities and mainstream culture. Resistance may have epidemic proportions as the Arabic Spring. Movements like Occupy or WikiLeaks operate across borders, but resistance also includes subtle transgressions within organizations.

Subcultural theory and cultural criminology have traditionally viewed ‘underground’ youth movements as providing images of deviance/resistance which the cultural industries harvest to turn a profit. The logic follows that street and sub cultures imbue products with a ‘transgressive edge’ that increases their appeal within youth markets. This paper uses the example of UK ‘grime’ music to demonstrate how this dynamic cannot be viewed as applying universally in contemporary times. Where their street orientated content is censured, many grime artistes express a desire for commercial success which would ultimately emerge through muting their rhetorical links to crime and violence and explicitly championing ‘mainstream’ values. This case is used as an empirical cue to explore the use and critique of the concept of ‘resistance’ within cultural criminology and subcultural theory. The paper problematizes commodification of resistance discourses as they apply to the rugged culture of the streets and indeed its supposed ‘oppositional’ character where disadvantaged urban youth clearly embody and practice the logic of neoliberalism. It furthermore suggests that certain critiques of cultural criminology go too far in denying any meaning to criminality and subcultural practice beyond consumer desire. Ultimately, the concept of ‘defiance’ is suggested as a useful tool to understand the norms of and behaviours of the excluded.

The politization of the concept of genocide by Western states has been severely criticised, because it has led to an impunity for genocidal crimes. In certain instances however, such criticism has contributed to the dynamic of victimization, instead of resisting it. The article discusses how Professor Edward S. Herman and journalist David Peterson’s staunch criticism of the politics of genocide amounts to a brazen denial of the genocide against the Tutsi which recycles much of the extremist discourse of the former Rwandan authorities that were implicated in genocide. In this case Herman and Peterson’s resistance against the politics of genocide has profound implications, several of which the article will address.

This article provides a theoretical analysis of the label ‘resistance’. It sets out from the premise that the notion of resistance, although it has been current in criminology for some time, is still vaguely defined. We argue that resistance is not just a negative term, but can also be seen as a positive and creative force in society. As such, the primary function of resistance is to serve as a solvent of doxa, to continuously question obviousness and common sense. In the process of resistance we distinguish three processes: invention, imitation and transformation. The third stage warrants deeper investigation within cultural criminology.

La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995) shows practices of resistance of youngsters in public space. Next to the traditional milieus of socialisation – at home, at school or in institutionalised leisure facilities – youngsters demand their ‘place’ in public space. In doing so, they partly privatise public space (‘parochial space’). In this article we argue that transgressive behaviour of youngsters should be conceptualised as both a side-effect of growing up and socialisation, and as resistance against adult domination, especially in public space. As such, hanging around is cause and effect of control and criminalisation.

This article deals with three questions. What did resistance mean in the 1970s and what does it mean today? Have the rituals of resistance changed over time? What is the status today of moral panic theory? These questions directly refer to ‘Resistance Through Rituals’ (1976) and ‘Policing the Crisis’ (1978). For that reason, one of the authors answers these key questions in a contemporary framework of hegemony, security and neoliberal politics, and points to the continuing relevance of the political and critical tradition of British cultural studies.

In 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs Dimitri Bogazianos, an assistant professor at the departement Criminal Justice of California State University, discusses the cultural links between the American ‘war on drugs’ and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. At the centre of his analysis is the parallel between what the author calls ‘the crack game’ and ‘the rap game’. On the one hand Bogazianos examines the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on the paradoxical punishment structure of crack; on the other hand the author focuses on the multiple ways crack appeared as a symbolical reference in the lyrics of rap artists.

Various disciplines have a longstanding tradition of studying musical genres and the various functions of music, but few criminologists focus on music in their scientific work. This article discusses various relationships between music, crime and culture. We discuss the hypothesis of ‘criminogenic’ music genres, and countless examples of criminalisation of music. We point at the stilistic importance of music genres for subcultures and social movements, and we raise ethical aspects: music can also be used as an instrument of (symbolic) violence, as a punishment or even as torture. Finally, we discuss other functional uses of music: as a vehicle for human emotions, for therapeutic purposes, to influence the behavior of employees and consumers, to enhance feelings of public safety, and to prevent crime and nuisance.

In this article on the social production of the book Outsiders, I will situate its production in the daily practice of the social worlds in which Becker was involved. Therefore I focus on the relations, interactions and situations which were relevant for the form, content and success of Outsiders. For data, I use fragments from my email communication with Howard Becker, the collected interviews and other publications which show that Becker seeks to demystify Outsiders. My main contribution is that I use Becker’s own words to demystify the ethnographic practice of Outsiders and describe its mundane backstage reality, which is described by Fine as ‘the underside’ of ethnography (1993).

The social history of jazz music in America since 1880 has been described as a movement out of the inauspicious background of night clubs and brothels in the urban underworld. In 1980 Ronald L. Morris has published a book, Wait until dark, fostering a contrary view (that should inspire criminology). Morris claimed that until 1940 the ‘mob’ had promoted jazz music as gangsters hired black musicians without concern for the law and the conventions of racial segregation. There is some evidence that even during the 1950s the jazz scene of New York City and Las Vegas had also been partly organized by the mafia.

It seems common knowledge among criminologists that our societies have to be understood in terms of securitization. This means that security is the defining and organizing concept in (social) policy making. In the Netherlands the process of securitization can be characterized as rather contingent. According to the author, it can be typified as ‘pragmatic securitization’. It is driven by the desire to show decisiveness and being in control of complexity of social order, rather than by ideology. Under the pressure of the economic crisis there is a growing interest in self-organization, civic power and civil society. These themes emerge along the issues of security and control. Is it possible then that security is exchanged by another big social theme?

By introducing the historical concept of timescapes, we will investigate the transformation of a security to a risk culture in Dutch post war history. We will test Ulrich Beck’s paradigm of the risk society with respect to the Dutch policy arena, and we will analyze what drove this postulated transformation in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, not the 1970s/1980s, but the 1990s saw the onset of this change. Concrete trigger moments and the rise of a new populist movement around 1999 signalled the beginning of this new mode of risk governance that was consolidated after 2001. With this description, an attempt to historicize the development of an all encompassing national security culture is provided.