At the level of local government, preventive and repressive measures are used within an integrated- personalized-approach to prevent disturbing and criminal behaviour. This integrated approach is only possible when the professionals involved can share data of subjects in order to get good insight of the existing problems and to find possible solutions. The Startbaan study, which focused on the collaboration within such an integrated-approach on young adults with multiproblems and justice contacts, shows that privacy regulations are perceived as being obstructive by professionals. More knowledge about the GDPR, its legal bases and domain specific regulations is necessary for an integrated-approach.

Prison visitation is important for protecting against social isolation during imprisonment. It is also essential for maintaining contacts that are important for life in prison and after release. It is therefore not surprising that both nationally and internationally important policy measures and scientific research have been undertaken on the topic. Nationally, however, limited scientific research is available regarding how many, how often and from whom prisoners receive visits, how visits are experienced and the possible effects of visitation, thus leaving many questions unanswered. Meanwhile, in the past ten years great changes have been made to visitation in Dutch prison policy and practice. Given these recent developments, both scientists and practitioners could benefit from an overview of the current state of affairs of visitation. This article aims to bridge the gap between research, policy and practice by summarizing findings from the Life in Custody study. This study includes a description of how visitation is organized legally, at the policy level and in practice, a thorough review of prior research on visitation and an analysis of the most recent national data on the prevalence and frequency of visitation, while considering important differences between prisoners and prisons.

There is casuistry, where on the one hand it is the turn of the professionals from the investigation, enforcement and prosecution and on the other hand the turn of the social workers from the social domain. This is the case, for example, when domestic violence occurs in circles that are also involved in organized crime. In theory it is possible that the professionals involved work together, but it is also not impossible that they will get into each other’s waters because they have a different vision of the problem to be tackled and, of course, also have to fulfill other roles and tasks based on their positions. A professional must be able to handle complex situations of this kind.

This article explores the boundary conditions an organization has to take to make the workplace, where all kind of people work together, a safe place. Employers are responsible for a safe working environment according to the Arbowet. The confidential councilor is an important part of the infrastructure against workplace harassment. Next to commitment from the top of the organization, a code of conduct based on the support of the employees, a complaints procedure with access to an independent complains committee, the confidential councilor is key to discover and act on workplace harassment. Not all confidential councilors are trained and aware of the pitfalls of the job. Organizations have to set boundary conditions. For example legal privilege within the organization and some sort of protection against retaliation. The confidential councilor follows the lead of the complainant and can put down the responsibility of solving the issue of harassment at the proper authority within the organization.

Violence in the name of honour has an ancient ring to it. But honour codes tend to be very flexible: cyber-space has given a new dimension to honour-related violence. Images and messages that are perceived as violations of honour also pass through social media. Unfortunately these stings on the good name of the family are quite difficult to remove. In this contribution is explained how violations of honour occur on the internet. Next to that will be described how currently in the Netherlands criminal law especially regarding vice is being adapted in order to deal with phenomena like sexting and sextortion. What are the consequences of these changes for dealing with modern forms of the violation of family honour?

While studies on trust in the police are numerous, this is much less the case for other policing actors. It is important to examine this in the light of the increasing number and diversification of policing actors and their legitimacy. Using a survey, 894 youngsters were asked to evaluate their trust in actors involved in the policing of urban nightlife areas: the police, door staff, and CCTV. Results showed that people tend to trust human actors of surveillance more compared to technological actors, however different (demographic and contextual) factors nuance this pattern.

By the end of 2020, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) will be operational. The EPPO will be tasked with investigating, prosecuting and bringing to judgement criminal offences against the EU budget. The substantive competence of the EPPO could in the future be extended to terrorism and other serious cross-border crimes. This article will first describe the background, structure and competences of the future EPPO. Then the procedural guarantees will be discussed and the problem of ‘forum shopping for evidence’. This problem entails that the choice in which Member State to conduct an investigative measure could be made on the basis of the less stringent rules in that Member State regarding, for example, the right to privacy. The article will end with a proposal on how to prevent forum shopping for evidence.

The Life In Custody-study is a large scale, prospective panel study, aimed to examine the quality of prison life in The Netherlands. This paper describes the LIC-study by giving a detailed overview of the data collection procedure, and strategies to optimize response, and presents the first nationwide results on prison climate in The Netherlands. Results show that the data collection procedures utilized were successful in obtaining a high response rate (which was an exceptional 81%) and reaching a representative group of prisoners. Furthermore, results show that the perceptions of prison climate vary across prison regimes, and to a lesser extent across age groups and time spent in detention.

While media coverage supports citizens in exercising their democratic rights, developments in the media have turned organizations into glass houses. In this article we investigate what media attention and subsequent public reactions after incidents mean for social professionals who work with the so-called ‘hard-to- reach’. We draw on a practical example, literature and interviews. Media attention turns out to affect the public image of organizations and professionals and consecutively alters the long term public judgment. This results in professionals feeling powerless, unrecognized and pressurized. Professionals adopt different strategies to deal with the effects of media attention: resignation, defensiveness, caution and organizational blame.

Police and prosecution can appeal to the public for information to further their case. This requires a balancing exercise between the rights of the suspect (and other people involved), specifically the right to privacy and the interest of criminal investigations. Appeals for information and wanted notices require a medium as well. Also, in order for the appeal to be effective, other (news)media need to publish the appeal as well: it needs to be newsworthy and attractive for the public intended. Based on deskresearch, this article describes how an ever-changing media landscape and different media revolutions affect the appeals for information.

Investigative reporters show an increasing interest in criminal phenomena. Dutch journalists may be allowed access to ongoing police investigations on the condition that they comply with data protection legislation. Working in international cooperative projects, using sophisticated research tools and hot sources, journalists by themselves also manage to uncover hidden crimes that may prompt indictments. The article explores possibilities of future collaboration between criminal investigators and reporters, while acknowledging each other’s professional roles and responsibilities.

With the development of the ‘digital society’ the information about crime on the internet is increasing rapidly. This creates the necessity for clarity about the boundaries of open source research by law enforcement agencies. However a specific article in the Code of Criminal Procedure lacks. While waiting for this article the police, the prosecution office, criminal defense lawyers and judges are struggling to find these boundaries. Nevertheless are they the only ones that can bring this clarity by informing themselves and exploring what should be legitimate.

This article concerns an experiment involving three learning communities of professionals cooperating across institutional boundaries to address domestic violence cases in multiple complementary ways. Providers of social services interacted with law enforcement in a juridical context to achieve an integrated approach. This alliance indicates the potential for values-based Good Work based on safety, professional care, and compassionate treatment. Playing with time and capacity can be a strategy, and each professional can benefit from multiple viewpoints for recognising and anticipating patterns of domestic violence before it (re)occurs.
A lack of funding has suspended embedding this Good Work, slowing progress toward achieving long-term goals and making this interdisciplinary approach to assuring sustainable safety unavailable to prevent repeated outbreaks of domestic violence.

Datingfraud is nothing new but it is an underexposed subject. Victims are approached on online datingsites by criminals whose goal is to gain large amounts of money. To achieve this, they start, with a false identity, an online relationship with their victims. In this article research has been done what the needs of the victims are after the offense has been committed. To this end interviews have been made with victims of datingfraud and staff members of victim support. Many victims do not end up with victim support because the police refuse to make a report. Nevertheless, the emotional and legal aid seems to functioning well. However, the practical help leaves much to be desired, especially because employees are not informed about all possibilities there are to support the victims.

Reducing the number of suicides in prison has been highlighted as an international priority. To date, however, studies examining prison suicides in Belgium are lacking. Therefore, adopting a retrospective record-based approach, we sought to investigate all suicides occurring in the whole Belgian prison estate during a 17-year period. The results underline the need for suicide prevention among prisoners in Belgium, and echo prior findings that restrictive preventive measures should be combined with psychosocial interventions in order to address the causes of prisoners being suicidal. Such strategies are ideally embedded within a comprehensive suicide prevention policy on a national level.

This contribution summarizes findings from the Prison Project on the longitudinal course of mental health problems during imprisonment. The findings illustrate that prisoners experience high levels of mental health problems. Shortly after their arrival in detention, a quarter of them experienced a high level of mental health problems, which is five times as high as men in the general population. Prisoners’ mental health problems decreased during imprisonment. Both characteristics of the correctional environment (e.g. a fair and respectful treatment by prison staff) and pre-existing characteristics of the prisoners (e.g. personality traits) are related to the course of mental health problems in detention.

Prison staff is exposed to aggression of prisoners which evokes work stress. In forensic psychiatry risk management principles, such as the Risk-Needs-Responsivity-model (RNR), assist staff to manage aggression by means applying risk management strategies. The Early Recognition Method (ERM) is such an evidence based strategy, developed and tested in forensic psychiatry. In ERM, staff gradually try to attune to aggressive behavior by means of the identification of early warning signs of aggression and systematically evaluated these in predetermined intervals. In this article it is explained and discussed how ERM could be applied meaningfully in prison services.