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 cultural criminology, we talk about crimes as secrets and secrets as crimes. There is a close relationship between criminality and secrecy. The unravelling of secrets can help us discover the meaning criminals attach to their actions and contacts. Secrets have always been a topical issue, as they are strongly embedded in our social world. Secrecy used to be functional in times of war and under dictatorships as a symbol of political and/or religious protest. Today, however, secrecy is most often associated with illegality and criminality. It is not easy to study secrets and secrecy, and for this reason criminological research requires specific, mainly ethnographic, research methods.

This issue is concerned with what this introduction calls the production of secure space. It thematizes the relationship between subjective safety or insecurity and space. As a prism for the analysis of this relationship, the issue focuses on the phenomenon of (semi) gated communities. As most of the contributions show, subjectively experienced insecurity is often but one factor in the formation of gated communities and other ‘gated’ forms of living. In thus focusing on the motives of middle class residents for gated forms of living, this issue departs with the dominant strand in ‘administrative criminology’, which partakes in an increasing localization and depoliticization of issue of crime and safety.