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.

Deze capita selecta privacyrecht schetsen een beeld van de actualiteit, maar ook de verwevenheid van het privacyrecht in de dagelijkse (rechts)praktijk. Hierbij is meer specifiek gekeken naar privacy bij overeenkomsten, privacy bij faillissementen en privacy bij fusies en overnames, mede met het oog op de sterke(re) partij in het privaatrecht.

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.

Since 1 April 2014, young adults aged 18 up to and including 22 years can be sentenced with juvenile sanctions in the Netherlands. This legislation is referred to as ‘adolescent criminal law’ (ACL). An important reason for the special treatment of young adults is their over-representation in crime. The underlying idea of ACL is that some young adult offenders are less mature than others. These young adults may benefit more from pedagogically oriented juvenile sanctions than from the deterrent focus of adult sanctions. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the young adults sentenced with juvenile sanctions since the implementation of ACL. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the demographic, criminogenic and criminal case characteristics of young adult offenders sentenced with juvenile sanctions in the first year after the implementation of ACL. A cross-sectional study was conducted using a juvenile sanction group and an adult sanction group. Data on 583 criminal cases of young adults, sanctioned from 1 April 2014 up to March 2015, were included. Data were obtained from the Public Prosecution Service, the Dutch Probation Service and Statistics Netherlands. The results showed that characteristics indicating problems across different domains were more prevalent among young adults sentenced with juvenile sanctions. Furthermore, these young adults committed a greater number of serious offences compared with young adults who were sentenced with adult sanctions. The findings of this study provide support for the special treatment of young adult offenders in criminal law as intended by ACL.

In the present study, the role of genetic and cultural transmission in intergenerational continuity of rule-breaking behavior (RBB) was investigated. Based on the resemblance within 3,982 Dutch twin pairs, aged 13 to 17 years, the relative importance of genetic (G), shared environmental (C), and unique environmental (E) influences on RBB was estimated. Cultural transmission, the process of passing on knowledge, norms and values, can lead to similarities within families, and forms part of the shared environment of children growing up in the same family. The authors found no evidence for shared environmental influences, and consequently no indication of a role for cultural transmission. Genetic influences explained 60 percent of the variance in rule-breaking behavior at age 13 to 17, implying that intergenerational continuity at this age is mainly driven by genetic transmission.

Nederland heeft in 2016 het VN-verdrag Handicap geratificeerd. Artikel 9 van het verdrag verplicht Nederland om bestaande en nieuwe gebouwen geleidelijk en proactief volledig toegankelijk te maken voor personen met een handicap. Volgens de overheid is het realiseren van een inclusieve samenwerking met de implementatie van het verdrag geen kwestie van op landelijk niveau ‘op een knop drukken’, maar vooral een proces van cultuurverandering en vernieuwing dat zijn beslag moet krijgen in de samenleving, met name op lokaal niveau en met inachtneming van ieders verantwoordelijkheid. Dat neemt niet weg dat Nederland veel meer kan doen om gebouwen sneller en beter toegankelijk te maken. Ook zonder het VN-verdrag Handicap.

This article examines whether samples obtained through offline and online modes, within the context of juvenile delinquency research, differ from one another, when in principle the same population of youths could be reached. Youths participating through a computer-assisted web interviewing mode (CAWI) report less delinquent behaviour, fewer risk factors for delinquency, and exhibit a lower prevalence in police registration, compared to youths participating through a mixed computer-assisted personal interviewing and computer-assisted self-interviewing mode (CAPI/CASI).

Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) is research in which legal questions are answered using empirical research methods. Traditionally, lawyers conduct normative, non-empirical research. Lately the legal discipline is increasingly interested in ELS. It is argued that we need more ELS. This raises the question to what extent Dutch researchers and practitioners conduct and apply ELS. In this article, we investigate the state of affairs of ELS in the Netherlands. We look at three different areas: legal research, legal education and legal practice. The data we use are legal PhD theses, legal course material, legislative proposals, and questionnaire data from legal practitioners. The methods are a systematic review, a quantitative content analysis, and a questionnaire research. Our study on legal research shows that researchers do apply empirical methods, but mainly the researchers with an education in social science. Our study on legal education shows that lawyers receive hardly any training on empirical research methods. Finally, our research on legal practice shows that practitioners and legislators struggle to apply empirical legal research. We plead for investments to enhance the production and usage of ELS, to prevent wrongful judicial decision-making, to generate effective legislation, and to create scientific innovation.

According to police statistics, juvenile crime in the Netherlands decreased annually since 2007. Explanations for the crime drop primarily focused on single macro explanations, such as increasing prosperity, focused policing or decreasing alcohol use. The prevalence of self-reported delinquency also dropped in the period 2005 till 2015. In three consecutive cohorts of the Youth Delinquency Survey (YDS; 2005, 2010, 2015) changes in exposure to risk and protective factors offered potential explanations for the drop in juvenile delinquency. Compared to previous cohorts, juveniles in the 2015-cohort were less exposed to risk factors like alcohol use and delinquent friends, and more exposed to protective factors like perceived emotional support, solicitation and monitoring by parents. Amongst serious delinquents, however, the exposure to individual risk behavior and delinquent friends was stable over time. Serious delinquents also showed stability over the cohorts in frequency and seriousness of offenses. The vulnerability for risk and protective factors was consistent amongst the three cohorts, regardless the seriousness of delinquency. Changing social cultural attitudes towards risk behavior, e.g. delinquency, could be an additional explanation for the juvenile crime drop. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.

The probation service gives advice to the court tens of thousands of time each year, coordinates tens of thousands of community service orders, and supervises tens of thousands of offenders. This is done professionally and takes place without much incidents or problems. However, the probation is not very well known to the general public. The identity of probation is also ambiguous and therefore not strong. There is less appreciation for the probation than they deserve. This can be met by making the probation service responsible for the implementation of all community-based sanctions (suspended sentences and other conditional modalities and community service orders), similar to the responsibility of the prison system for custodial sanctions and measures. Secondly, by differentiation in the nature and intensity of activities. Many probation clients do well. They represent only a low risk, and probation involvement may be limited. For other clients, more is needed: more activities, greater intensity and focus on criminogenic needs. It is proposed to distinguish between probation and probation plus. In both, probation supervision and community service are at the center, but the plus version is emphatically more focused on rehabilitation and reintegration, and thus on minimizing recidivism. This requires more efforts by the probation service. It also requires adapting the organization: one probation organization that is accountable and responsible for the implementation of community-based sanctions, but with the possibility to outsource work if special expertise and special activities are required.

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 Netherlands, the judge has the possibility to impose an entirely or partly suspended sentence. In this article, the perspective of judges and public prosecutors on the deterrent effect of the suspended sentence is investigated. For that purpose, 1000 court decisions were examined, and 15 judges and 15 public prosecutors were interviewed. The results show that the suspended sentence provides opportunities to intervene in the offender’s life regarding issues that are supposed to be related to recidivism. Judges and public prosecutors regard the suspended sentence as an important device to reduce the recidivism risk.

In this introductory article we introduce the subject of our thematic issue on ‘macro criminology’, and illustrate it with a short historical overview and examples of ‘typical macro criminological’ research. Successively we address the recent decrease in crime in many Western countries (the ‘crime drop’), the increased tendency to punish more severely in the last decennia (the ‘punitive turn’), and historical developments in homicide (‘history of violence’). After that we address an important theoretical and philosophical problem with regard to macro criminology: the balance between micro and macro factors in explaining macro phenomena. Finally, the contributions of this thematic issue are introduced.

In the Netherlands, from 2007 police census data show a sharp decrease in the number of suspects of crime among juveniles aged 12 to 25 years old. How to explain this decrease remains unclear. Constructionist theories suggest that changes in police census data are fully explained by changes in the law enforcement system. Normative theories argue that changes in police data can be explained by demographic, social or economic trends. In this paper, we systematically explored the (inter)national literature for macro factors that could explain changes in juvenile crime. Next, in an empirical case study of the city of Amsterdam, we explored which of these macro factors relate to changes over time in the number of juvenile suspects of crime and the types of crime they were suspected of. Due to multicollinearity of the macro factors multivariate analyses were not possible. Our results indicate that the decrease in police registered juvenile crime in Amsterdam should be explained by multiple factors. Some of these factors concern policy investments (such as focus on school drop-out and targeted law enforcement), other factors relate to socialdemographic developments which appeared coincidentally.

Knowledge about the effects of the architectural design of prisons is limited. This large-scale study examined the relation between prison design and inmates’ perceptions of their conditions of confinement. Data were used from the Prison Project, in which inmates held in all Dutch remand centers were interviewed (N=1,715). Multilevel analyses showed that the architectural design was related to inmates’ perspective: prisoners in panopticon designs experienced their autonomy, safety and relationships with staff less positive than prisoners in other designs. Specific characteristics of the prison design, like more gallery levels and a higher rate of double bunking, were also associated with less positive inmates’ perceptions.

Over the last 60 years, attention has been drawn periodically to offenders in different age categories, such as young children, adolescents and young adults, and tor services and programmes that should be available for these groups. In 2011, the State Secretary of Security and Justice proposed a penal law for adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 23. Such a proposal requires a (empirical) view of young adult offenders (aged 18 to 24) and the penal sanctions they receive in comparison with adolescent (aged 12 to 17) offenders and adults (aged 25 to 30). Crime statistics show that prevalence, type and seriousness of crime committed by young adults are different from that of adolescents and adults. Self-report studies show fewer and smaller differences, but this may be explained in part by the more serious nature of offences committed by young adults, which are usually not addressed in self-reports. Outcomes support the idea that a separate approach and specific interventions for young adults are needed. Similarities with adolescents with regard to neurobiological development justify a focus on a more pedagogical and behavioral approach, which is also a key feature of penal justice for juveniles.