This editorial offers an introduction to the current issue.

Met gepaste trots presenteren wij het eerste nummer van het Tijdschrift voor Bijzonder Strafrecht & Handhaving, een tijdschrift met de ambitie zich als academisch vakblad te richten op academici en andere professionele beoefenaren van het bijzonder strafrecht, inclusief het bestuurlijke handhavingsrecht, voor zover dit mede van betekenis is voor de strafrechtelijke handhaving van het financieeleconomisch recht. Zowel vanuit de politiek als de rechtspraktijk neemt de aandacht voor de bestrijding van financieel-economische criminaliteit de laatste jaren sterk toe, terwijl ook binnen de wetenschap met steeds meer nadruk specifiek wordt stilgestaan bij het bijzonder deel van het strafrecht.

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.

Like surfers, legislators … who wish to change everyday social norms must wait for signs of a rising cultural support, catching it at just the right time... (Kagan and Skolnick 1993: 85) The empirical study of the relation between the way a law comes into being and its effectiveness in practice is an underdeveloped subject in the sociology of law. In this article this relation is studied with respect to smoking bans in the Netherlands. The focus is on private companies in general, with special attention for Dutch cafés, bars, hotels and restaurants (where such a ban was recently introduced). Dutch smoking bans in private establishments were only enacted after the government was convinced of public support and after a period of selfregulation. This proved to be a good preparation. The general picture of the relation between the emergence and the effectiveness of smoking bans in Dutch hotels, restaurants etc. is much the same. However, there is one sector - bars, pubs and the like – in which the smoking ban has encountered problems. In this sector a fourth of the establishments refuse to comply. A question addressed in this article is whether the legislator acted too precipitously with respect to this sector. This is obviously the case: there is less public support for smoking bans in such establishments and there had not been a preparatory period of selfregulation.

In een redactioneel artikel geeft de redactie een toelichting op het tijdschriftnummer in kwestie.

In een redactioneel artikel geeft de redactie een toelichting op het tijdschriftnummer in kwestie.