In this article Tom Daems and René van Swaaningen discuss work and life of the late Dutch historian Pieter Spierenburg. The article is based on an interview the authors conducted with Spierenburg in November 2018 as well as his published work and excerpts of an unpublished biography. The article discusses in particular themes related to his interest in, and contributions to, the history of crime and punishment, in particular Spierenburg’s path-breaking book The Spectacle of Suffering (1984), his relation to Norbert Elias and the Amsterdam School and his critique of Michel Foucault.

This article starts off with an exposé of what ‘theoretical innovation’ means in the social sciences. The development of criminology is considered to be a result of (1) historical and cultural developments, (2) political-economic developments, (3) developments in other academic disciplines and (4) reactions to or specifications of other theoretical perspectives in criminology itself. Paradigm shifts in criminology are characterised by an individualistic and positivist aetiological turn in its early days; a sociological turn towards a ‘criminology of the lawmaker’ from the late 1950s on; and a return to positivism in the neoliberal and neoconservative turn of the 1990s. The new century ushers in a new epistemological break in criminology, in which globalisation, global warming, migration, human rights and the implications of cyberspace ‘force’ criminologists to overcome their anthropocentric and colonial character biases.

On the occasion of the publication of a collection of articles by Stanley Cohen in 2016 (edited by Tom Deams), René van Swaaningen pays a tribute to this important, thought-provoking and pioneering thinker in criminology. He takes Cohen’s adage that we as critical criminologists always have to balance between intellectual scepticism and political commitment as a starting point for an analysis of his work. Cohen’s rejection of criminology as a liberal project may have led him to defining himself as an ‘anti-criminologist’, yet at the same time Cohen has been able to transform the discipline as such into a more power-critical direction. Two of Cohen’s key-contributions to criminological theory, those on moral panics and on denial, are discussed and related to each other. Whilst adopting Foucault’s analyses of power as a constructing practice, Cohen, in his work on social control, rejects the pessimist implications of Foucault’s work, in which human agency is defined away. In this essay, the relation of Cohen’s work with that of his mentor David Matza is also discussed, as well as is his great and ironic style of writing.

Jacqueline de Savornin Lohman is a ‘positive criminologist’ avant la lettre. In this interview, she tells about her belief in personal people’s willingness and ability to deal with problems (such as the reception of refugees), the discouraging role of government in this respect, her internment in a Japanese camp in the Netherlands’ Indies during WW II, the persons who have inspired her most (e.g. Louk Hulsman) and her initial disbelief in the idea of a ‘glass ceiling’ for women in a male-dominated academia. She would, however, be confronted with some stunning examples of everyday sexism – such as reactions that she did not need a tenured position at the university, because she does not have to maintain a family. Being active in the women’s movement, also led her to engage in critical victimological studies – mainly on sexual violence. The main part of the interview deals with the practical consequences she has drawn from her critical action-theory on criminal justice ‘Allowed evil?’ (Kwaad dat mag?) from 1975, such as her role in the establishment of the Dutch liberal democrat party D’66, her involvement in the Coornhert League for Penal Reform, her attempts to establish a platform for various practical, critical social work initiatives in the penal field and indeed the establishment of one of the first mediation projects in the Netherlands – which she saw boycotted by the Ministry of Justice, that, in the late 1980s, instrumentalised the victim’s voice for a stiffening of the penal system.

While in the sixties hackers were the heroes of cyberspace, they are nowadays often perceived as the archetype cybercriminal. From the perspective of labelling theory, this empirical study examines how hackers feel perceived by society at large, how they perceive themselves as ‘others’ and how they view themselves in relation to ‘others’. Our research shows that hackers – despite of an experienced negative labelling – view themselves as positive ‘others’. We conclude that the features of the hacking phenomenon itself (skillset, mindset, own morality) in combination with the digital context in which they operate, enable hackers to avoid a ‘spoiled identity’.

Herman Bianchi, who passed away on the 30th of December 2015, has been a true ‘significant other’ for cultural criminologists. This article is a ‘criminological Verstehen’ of Bianchi’s work. His general attitude towards criminology is characterised by a mix of academic analysis, emotional outrage and incongruities. In order to understand this, his contributions to criminology are linked to biographical notes and to the mixed reactions he got on his work. Bianchi played an important role in the establishment of criminology as an autonomous academic discipline, yet he was very critical of this ‘discipline of shame’ because it has always served the exclusion of the most vulnerable members of society. He has been one of the frontmen of critical criminology, but he was not a Marxist. His concern for the despised other is related to his eternal fear, as a gay man in a ‘closet with a revolving door’, of new waves of discrimination against gays, and his rigorous abolitionism to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi-concentration camp in 1944. Bianchi’s historical interest led him at the end of his career in the 1980s to support the emergence of strong historical criminol­ogy, but his utilitarian use of historical studies, also resulted in some clashes with professional historians.

In this article, the questions why scientific misconduct has become a subject of criminological research and how scientific misconduct relates to a production-oriented academic culture are examined. It is argued that the current academic career path produces an anomic academic culture. The authors further examine the slippery notion of the term ‘scientific misconduct’ and conclude that questions about the prevalence or increase of scientific misconduct are hardly answerable. They also point at a number of undesirable side-effects of the emerging culture of distrust and control in academia, amongst which socially disengaged, highly predictable and little innovative research. They end with a plea to recapture a truly academic culture.

For the occasion of the 40 ^th anniversary of the Netherlands’ Society of Criminology the author has analysed the Society’s archive and related the development of this professional organisation to the development of Dutch criminology in the period between 1974 and 2014. He distinguishes five turning points in this respect: between 1965 and 1974 we witnessed the emancipation of criminology as an autonomous discipline; the period 1978-1985 is characterised by a downfall of criminology at the universities; between 1992 and 1995 a period of restoration started, that is characterised by a focus on criminology’s policy-relevance; from 1999 to 2010 we can witness a recovery, in which academic criminology raised like a phoenix from its ashes; and from that time on we see the discipline broadening up again, in which the dominance of positivist research agendas is countered by a cultural criminology and a more critical attitude towards the production-oriented research policy in general. The bottom line is that the Society followed these trends imperceptibly: it was active when criminology did well and was ‘in rest’ when it did not. The article concludes with the question whether the Society has an active role to play in the public debate about the role of science and crime and punishment.

Cultural criminology has shown an interest in the visual representation of perpetrators, victims and scenes of crime and punishment in the media. Relatively little attention has been paid to the visual representation of these subjects in the fine arts, however. This lacuna has been the inspiration for this special issue about the art of representation and the relationship between fine arts and criminology. Questions that are addressed include: What is the importance and meaning of representational art for the criminologist? It is conceivable that a criminological researcher would reformulate his or her research problem due to insights that have been articulated by artists? And, by the same token, is it possible that an artist would revise his or her representation because of scientific research? Or, are the doings of both independent of one another? Ultimately, this special issue is concerned with how representations of perpetrators, victims and scenes of crime and punishment come into being, which meaning these images have in different social and cultural contexts and what we, as criminologists, can contribute to them.

Since the mid-1980s American recipes for the fight against crime and nuisance are very popular amongst Dutch policymakers. The question posed in this article is why they rather look at the United States than at European countries far more comparable to the Netherlands. The authors answers this question by pointing at the popularity of neo-liberal recipes in general, an emotional historical bond marked by the time that New York was still called New Amsterdam and the liberation from Nazism in 1945, the (sometimes reluctant) acceptance of the US’ role as ‘the world’s policeman’ and a (mostly unspoken) belief that ‘bigger is better’. Next, the author draws some lessons from research on ‘how policy travels’: 1) crime policies are always in much wider social policies and idea(l)s; 2) if something ‘works’ in country A it doesn’t mean it also ‘works’ in country B; 3) policies are always adopted to national circumstances; 4) policymakers are particularly fond of simple messages and dislike nuances and criticism; 5) you can also look at the US in order to find out where ‘we’ don’t want to go; and 6) you most of all learn more about yourself if you look at other countries. The author concludes with a plea for critical cosmopolitanism and a decolonisation of criminology from national biases.

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.

The current phase in which Dutch government increasingly criminalizes the illegal residence of migrants is simultaneously characterized by decreasing numbers of illegal migrants in this country. In the process of crimmigration, some newly developed policies indirectly influence daily lives of specific groups of illegal migrants while other policies and laws more directly try to hinder illegal stay. These policies that aim to exclude and ban illegal migrants are continued even though they are increasingly criticized by academics and divergent (inter)national actors. These policies and laws can be contradictory, sometimes conflict with international treaties, and lead to unforeseen and undesirable outcomes in which human dignity is challenged.

Biographies of ‘criminals’ are an immensely popular genre. As ‘true crime’ stories they are generally found on the shelves of fiction literature. In this article the authors examine their cultural criminological significance. First, they examine what makes a ‘good’ biography, analyse how biographical material is used in the work of people like Robert Park and his Chicago School, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and indeed historians. Then the authors list different traditions of criminal biographies. They conclude by arguing that ‘good biographies’, i.e. biographies that are both sufficiently emic and offer enough context information, have a lot to offer, because they show ‘the other side’ of criminology, provide information that cannot be obtained through strictly scientific methods and counter the reductionist images prevailing in the discipline.

In this interview with René van Swaaningen Jock Young discusses the development of his work from the ethnographic work in Notting Hill that in 1971 led to the The Drugstakers, to the New Criminology of 1973 and Left Realism that emerged in the early 1980s. In his current work on cultural criminology Young invites us to take a closer look at the work of C. Wright Mills on sociological imagination and the power elites and Robert Merton’s on social structure and anomie. According to Young this would make a forceful critique of the current policy-ridden and a-theoretical state criminology is currently in.

In the introduction to this first issue of the Dutch Journal on Culture and Crime, the editors first examine the history of cultural perspectives in criminology and the reasons why this approach is particularly relevant to analyse crime in our globalised consumer societies. Cultural criminology’s social-constructionist perspectives on the key-concepts, culture and crime, are elaborated next, followed by an exposé of the new imaginative meaning of media-studies in our age of information. In the last paragraph the claim is made that, although ethnography plays a key-role, there is a wide variety of research methodologies that can be applied in cultural criminological framework.

In this contribution the author reviews: sense of penal change: Punishment, victimization & society, by Tom Daems.

In this article we want to show how different actors (amongst whom residents, professional safety-functionaries and street youth) view the safety situation in Rotterdam’s problematic neighbourhood ‘the Old West’ in very different ways and start from very different parameters. We conclude that the one-dimensional image of an unsafe neighbourhood that emerges from the city’s official, quantitative measurement instrument, the so-called ‘Safety Index’ (Veiligheidsindex), does not do justice to the diversity of opinions and visions of the different actors in the neighbourhood and is thus unsuited as the political ‘compass’ for local safety policy it was intended for. This diversity comes much better to the surface in the qualitative, ethnographic research on which this article is based. Such research enables us first to better understand safety as a local phenomenon and secondly offers more concrete points of departure for policy.