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 examines the transformations in form and function of rituals in the squatting movement in Amsterdam. Upon roaring early years, rituals emerged around the search for houses to squat, the actual squatting and evictions. These rituals were recognized and used by squatters as well as other parties and they have contributed to the reduction of violence. Meanwhile, squatting in the Netherlands was prohibited and the question arises if, in this new situation, form and function of rituals have changed too. The findings shed some light on the broader link between rituals and resistance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the basis of article 1F Refugee Convention alleged perpetrators of serious crimes can be excluded from refugee protection. Under certain circumstances this exclusion can be regarded a unique type of contemporary banishment and branding. The rationale to exclude is primarily motivated by moral arguments, rather than security related arguments. In case Dutch government cannot deport the excluded persons, the exclusion is not limited to a certain place but (de facto) universal in nature. When the banished alleged perpetrators are declared undesirable aliens they are ‘branded’ as actual perpetrators.

In his first book Knock-out from 2009, Rein Gerritsen tells his story of how easy it is to end up on the wrong path. Conversely, in the second part of his autobiography, 13 accidents, he explains how hard it is as an ex-convict to stay on the right track. This goes to show that there is much truth in what they say: ‘The real punishment only starts after you’re out.’ This article is an excerpted pre-publication from 13 accidents.

The central question of this article is whether biographies can be a source for criminological research on white-collar crime and how they can contribute to the explanation of white-collar crime. To answer this question, 35 Dutch biographies were studied. Following the legal ambiguities of white-collar crime, not all of these biographies are about criminal offences. And following the dominant anthropomorphic approach to corporate crime, some of these are corporate biographies. Many biographies confirm current criminological explanations of the causation of white-collar crime. Yet, biographies also offer additional insights, for instance about the causal relevance of the private life of white-collar offenders.

Approaching the night as a particular time and space for secret transgressions, this article examines the nightlife of Antwerp youth in the early twentieth century. Although this period saw increased official attempts to legally regulate ‘immoral’ nocturnal juvenile amusements, the police allowed most young people to move around unbothered at night, intervening only in major public order disturbances and handling most juveniles informally. Parents were more ‘efficient’, filing complaints with the juvenile judge on charges of ‘misconduct’, seeking to end familial financial troubles caused by heavy spending on nightlife. Working-class youth increasingly turned to the movies and dancing, in search for a secret ‘second life’ of pleasures away from conventional social and sexual codes, where they could belong and feel special.

This article examines the silence of control agents. It is often said that control agents as representatives of the risk society are obsessed with control activities and fact-finding, and that rule breakers are regularly exposed by negative publicity. The author takes the contrary position that even major cases demonstrate the persistence of silence on the part of control agents. He distinguishes between two types of silence: denial and secrecy. Denial means that control agents saw nothing while they could have discovered wrongdoing. He points to the fact that this denial in the face of knowledge is the result of sociological ambivalence: control agents are often forced to reconcile conflicting interests, which supersede the importance of supervision. The article shows that secrecy plays an important role in trust relationships between control agents and the objects of their supervision. Secrecy enables control agents to better obtain information. In effect, with regard to the supply of information and the scrutiny of the objects under supervision, control agents are dependent on the cooperativeness of the objects of supervision. These days, much emphasis is placed on breaking the walls of silence. Perpetrators, victims and witnesses, as well as control agents, are being encouraged to break the silence through the use of star witness arrangements, whistleblower arrangements, witness protection, and reporting centres. But is this effective? The author suggests that maintaining secrecy is essential and that those measures limit the space for control agents to develop trust relationships with the objects of supervision, and thereby the opportunity to engage in fact-finding.

Desire for safety, security, community, and ‘niceness’, as well as wanting to live near people like themselves because of a fear of ‘others’ and of crime, is expressed by most residents living in gated communities. The emergence of a fortress mentality and its phenomenal success is surprising in the United States where the majority of people live in open and unguarded neighborhoods. Thus, the rapid increase in the numbers of Americans moving to secured residential enclaves invites a more complex account of their motives and values. While their reasoning is largely the same as other middle class Americans, these seemingly self-evident explanations encompass deeper meanings and concerns. This article reviews the consequences of living in a gated community based on resident interviews, behavioral mapping, and participant observation field notes. I begin with a history of gating and then use ethnographic examples to summarize what I learned. I conclude with a discussion of ‘community’ as it is being re-conceived through a discourse of fear of crime in the United States through private governance and gating, and outline what we can do to ameliorate its negative aspects.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than forty White South Africans in a middle class neighborhood of Cape Town, this paper looks at the motivations to secure South African houses and neighbourhoods with perimeter walls, security initiatives and neighbourhood watches. The discourses of the residents make it clear that seemingly banal actions to secure the residential environment are motivated as much by the fear of falling property prices and the fear of losing psychological comfort as they are driven by the high levels of crime and fear of crime.

In the public spheres of the global cities, religion is getting more visible. However, this is not an independent process, but is linked to broader urban processes like segregation, security and (fear of) crime. With two different examples from Istanbul, this article explains how religious motivations become ways of expression for existing or emerging lines of urban segregation. While religious motivations appear as a tool used against urban gentrification in the area of Tophane; in the gated community of Basaksehir, religion, together with ‘fear of crime’ and ‘fear of immorality’, serves to differentiate a middle class living space from the ‘scary’ and ‘immoral’ environment of the big city.

An analysis of about 2,200 cases of homicides in the Netherlands committed between 1992 and 2006 shows that lethal violence typically results from conflict in symmetric relations in which social rank is ambiguous. The settings of homicides are mostly well-integrated, small communities, including families, rural villages in tribal and agrarian societies, modern urban neighbourhoods, gettos, criminal organisations, and ethnic enclaves. The mechanism that drives antagonism between people in such places is their attachment, close-knit structure, and common features. Earlier, Simmel developed this insight in lethal conflict when saying ‘the more we have in common with another as whole persons, the more easily will our totality be involved in every single relationship to that person, hence the disproportionate violence to which normally well-controlled people can be moved within their relations to those closest to them.’ Contemporary sociologists, ethnographers, and historians amply corroborated this view of lethal violence. In his comparative work Gould shows a compelling connection between ambiguity of social rank and lethal conflict. Knauft investigated the high homicide rates in a New Guinea community and found that lethal violence resulting from sorcery attributions is not the anti-thesis of the ideal of ‘good company’ but its ultimate culmination.

This article describes and judges the complex and often contradictory dynamic by which boundaries are constructed and transgressed. This dynamic reveals much about power, meaning, and the political economy of crime and control. The author describes the project undertaken by Critical Mass riders and precarity activists. These projects explore the possibilities of drift as collective experience and collective transgression. The pervasiveness of drift in contemporary society, paired with the subversive cultures of drift emerging around new social movements and alternative spatial practices, point toward a new kind of global collectivity.