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).

In this essay the nature of crime and death in opera is dealt with, focussing on a select number of operas, such as Verdi’s MacBeth, Wagner’s Die Walküre and Strauss’s Salome and Elektra. It appears that crime in opera is pervasive and appears in many different forms, as well as in a wide variety of contexts. An attempt is made to analyse the way composers manipulate the circumstances of killings – lenghtening or shortening or replacing scenes – in order to get maximum results in terms of emotional content.

This article deals with the performance of ‘street credibility’. A dramaturgical analysis of the lyrics and videos of 15 rap artist from The Hague sheds light on the various ways they try to achieve a credible street reputation as rappers. In their frontstage presentation they highlight their street knowledge, strike violent poses, and claim affiliation to certain infamous local gangs or neighborhoods. Backstage, however, these performances are being deconstructed by other actors who participate in the local street culture and who form a critical, metaphysical audience of the presentations of the rappers.

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.

In this article I will explore the concept of transgression within the realm of rock music using the biography of Lou Reed, known for such songs as ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ’I’m Waiting for the Man’. I discuss Lou Reed’s social transgressions as a reaction to and resistance toward institutions of social control such as family, media and the music industry, which stigmatized him as an outsider. This study, which is based on secondary material, such as biographies, interviews and songs, shows how Lou Reed transgressed social norms with respect to drugs, sex, and gender.

Over the past couple of decades, the Netherlands unmistakably has developed into a Garlandian style culture of control. A distinct feature of this Dutch culture of control is the increasing interconnectedness between crime and migration in both public and political discourse. As a result of the growing urge to control potential dangerous others, various stop & search powers have been implemented. Besides by their proactive nature, these powers are defined by the fact that they give a fair amount of discretion to individual police officers in deciding who to stop. In this article, while drawing on criminological, sociological and social psychological literature on stereotyping and the rise of a crime complex, the authors will argue that the structural and cultural changes fuelling the emergence of a the typical Dutch culture of control might also affect the individual choices made by police officers in such a way that it fosters ethnic profiling.

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.

This article suggests that fears and concerns about disorder and crime are connected with urbanophobia, i.e. a low willingness to identify with public space and a certain incapacity to recognize deviancy and give it a place in one’s mind map. For this reason many citizens may not develop public familiarity. At the same time it is argued that tackling urban disorder is often necessary but not for reasons that proponents of repression and zero tolerance think. Current crime and disorder policies bring forth many counterproductive results, including increased fear and powerlessness. It seems more reasonable to combat disorder to undo the ‘situational normality’ of persistent forms of anti-social behaviour. For many citizens this signals a restoration of expected peaceful interaction.

Order in Security. A Dynamic Perspective (Schuilenburg 2012) is a theoretical and empirical study of self-organizing processes of change taking place within what the author calls ‘security assemblages’. In this review, the study is favorably evaluated as a form of empirical philosophy and praised for usefully introducing French philosophy into the field of security studies. In terms of empirical sociological research, however, the study is more critically reviewed as offering little insight into the perceptions, emotions, interpretations and meanings that actors assign to their conduct in this field.

In this interview with Marc Schuilenburg David Garland discusses the development of his ideas in his work, from Punishment and Welfare (1985) to Punishment and Modern Society (1990), and from The Culture of Control (2001) to Peculiar Institution (2010). Garland explains his view on the role of ideology in relation to punishment and the influence of Émile Durkheim on his work. He discusses the misreading of The Culture of Control by arguing that where most people focus on the punitive turn in the fight against criminality, the preventive turn is of much greater importance. Moreover he talks about the possibility of resistance against the process of securitization and elaborates on his new project on the welfare state.

Until approximately 1995, the Netherlands had a very low prison rate compared to the surrounding countries. David Downes, who made a comparison between the Dutch and the British penal policy, choose as a title for his book: Contrasts in Tolerance. He attributed the differences between England & Wales and the Netherlands, partly to the tolerant culture in the Netherlands compared to England & Wales (Downes, 1985: 69 e.v.). What exactly did he mean by tolerance in this context and in how far can this characteristic of Dutch penal policy explain the recent downfall of the Dutch prison population.

This introduction aims to position the present-day ‘liquid’ security culture in the context of cultural and political developments. Key-words in the cultural patterns in which the new ‘liquid policy’ and ‘new toughness’ is embedded are fear, precaution, late modern anomie and a social hypochondria towards everything that deviates from one’s ‘own’ culture and identity. These cultural phenomena have been translated in political terms, that are divided into neoliberal and neoconservative tendencies. The neoliberal turn in safety politics have resulted in a depoliticisation of democratic decision making, a desolidarisation of ideas on community safety and a deregulation of safety policies. Neoconservative tendencies are reflected in a resentment towards ‘the elites’, ‘the underclass’ and foreigners and a punitive populism, in which claims for stiffer sentences are continuously swept up, regardless of the effect they may have.

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.