This special issue introduces the topic of cybercrime to Dutch criminology. First, it raises the major substantive issues that computer technology involves for criminology, in terms of crime volume, people involved in crime, and the ways that crimes are committed. Also, it deals with research literature on cybercrime on various topics, such as survey methodology, crime prevention and Internet applications open to justice professionals in the fight against crime. Overall, the article concludes that much research remains to be done in this relatively new field.

In contrast to the societal debate, the topic of religion and crime is only scarcely present in contemporary criminological research. A special issue on this theme hence seemed very relevant. Even though the editors launched an open call, the submitted proposals were almost always related to Islam. In this introduction we therefore reflect on questions and themes that, in our opinion, should be included in this special issue on religion and crime. First, we give a short overview of Belgian, Dutch and American research on the missing theme of sexual abuse in the church. Second, we discuss the complex concept of ‘religion’. Third, we assess the complex relationship between religion and crime and reflect on the question of whether and when religion leads to more or, on the contrary, less crime. We end this introduction with a brief overview of the selected contributions for this special issue.

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.

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