The Dutch Supreme Court has the power to destroy a penal condition if a lower court imposes those conditions contrary to the law. Problems may arise when the Supreme Court solely destroys the condition. In that case there is no longer an imposed condition, which can be contrary to the meaning of the lower court. It can even derogate the imposed sentence, whilst the convicted is not obligated to conform to those conditions. That problem can – in extreme cases – harm society. Even so can be said that those decisions of the Supreme Court are not in favor of the convicted.

A revision of the Dutch vice law is to be expected, amongst others with regard to sex between minors. The current standard requires such contacts to be in violation with the social view, indicating that the minor’s perspective is subdue to the majority opinion. Applying the legal standard of ‘indeceny’ (‘ontuchtig’), the judiciary are left with room for interpretation. In order to grant minors more sexual autonomy and to further legality, the legislator wants to change the criterion, opting for the standard of ‘other than in an equal relationship’. This begs the question whether this will solve the interpretive issues that flow from such open criteria. In order to predict whether the standard of ‘other than in an equal relationship’ will contribute to clarify the issues of legality, the jurisprudence with regard to the standard of ‘indecency’ was analyzed in order to learn which variables are applied by the magistracy.

The authors have taken a contribution from Frank Bovenkerk from 2003 as a starting point. In this text, Bovenkerk reflects on taboos in criminology. In science, in addition to independence, focus on truth-finding, a willingness to self-correct and organized skepticism, courage is also an important quality. Where Bovenkerk focuses more broadly on criminology, this contribution focuses in particular on taboos and requirements for scientists in police research.

In 1981, PROCES published its first article on the criminal justice system in a pluriform or multicultural society. That article turned out to be the first of many articles on so-called cultural offences, like honour related violence and female genital mutilation, and the ways in which the criminal justice system could and should respond to these offences. This article reviews the various articles written on these topics for the past forty years and tries to finds an answer why it was that authors choose PROCES to publish their articles.

For this anniversary issue of the centenary of the journal PROCES, we focused on the field of forensic psychiatry. What does one hundred years of PROCES tell us about the developments in this domain? Our starting point was an article from 1930. At that time, forensic psychiatry was not yet an integrated part of the criminal process. The anonymous author makes a plea for this to be the case. He substantiates this on the basis of four cases from his own practice. Now, one hundred years later, we conclude that this integration of forensic psychiatry into the criminal justice practice has been accomplished: there is ample attention to the mental health of suspects and detainees. The cases also show us how drastically the perspective on delinquents with a mental condition has changed, as a suspect suffering from a mental disorder was seen, by definition, as not criminally responsible. Reviewing the developments of the past hundred years has made us realize how temporary and transient our current perspective is. We are, however, convinced that the interest in individual motives of delinquents will always remain.

This article examines how the enforcement of dog biting incidents takes place in the Netherlands. Enforcement can be carried out using both criminal and administrative law. This practice is discussed, as well as where the bottlenecks in enforcement practice are. Finally, proposals are made to improve present practices.

Worldwide, at least 1,900 Dutch prisoners are housed in foreign detention every year. Although previous research describes this group of prisoners and the conditions of their detention, it is unknown to what extent they reoffend after returning to the Netherlands. A unique dataset with data of 690 Dutch people has been used. They are supervised during their foreign detention by the International Office, part of the Dutch Probation Service. The results show that 23% of this group reoffended within two years. Furthermore, the probability of reoffending differs for the country of detention, age, way of return and prior incarcerations.

The contribution of sport to reintegrating offenders receives limited attention, both in science and in the practice of probation and the prison system. From the perspective of desistance, this literature study concluded that sport can contribute to the development of individual capital, social capital and an alternative identity. However, the effect of sport is not necessarily positive. There are risks of negative influence or the reinforcement of problem behaviour. In counselling offenders, sport should be combined with other interventions to reduce recidivism. A personalized approach is required, based on the risk-need-responsivity model.

The victim’s position in Dutch criminal law has been strengthened. There has been an emancipation of the victim in criminal law. However, not much attention is being paid on the role and position of the victim in the Dutch administrative procedure. This article explores the scope of what is called ‘Administrative victimology’. Administrative victimology is an empirical science that deals with the position and legal role of the victim in the administrative procedure. It is expected that this ‘new’ type of victimology will become more important in the years to come.

Incidents involving persons with ‘confused behavior’ are an important and topical theme in Dutch society. The police are often the first to be involved in these incidents because they are the only public organization that has a 24/7 presence on the streets. In 2019, the police registered 96,000 reports of persons who showed confused behavior. It is therefore not surprising that the police have repeatedly drawn political-administrative attention to this situation and indicated that the limits have been reached. That raises the question of how police officers deal with a situation that has actually grown above their heads in daily practice. In this research, based on the theory of street-level bureaucracy introduced by Lipsky, it was investigated how police officers in The Hague use their discretion to cope with this difficult reality.

In 2014, the Dutch government abolished its ban on blasphemy, which had laid dormant in its criminal code for decades. Similar laws have been abolished in nine other jurisdictions in the West since an international campaign to this end started in 2015. This article first describes the tension between blasphemy laws and the freedom of expression. It then examines the Dutch position on blasphemy in its international context. This article argues against bans on blasphemy and specifically against a potential reintroduction of a de facto ban on blasphemy in the Netherlands. Moreover, it argues in favour of applying political pressure to abolish bans on blasphemy around the world as well as giving diplomatic support to those affected by these laws.

Rehabilitation of hospitalized offenders is a stepwise process ideally achieved through four consecutive types of leave: supervised, unsupervised, extra-institutional and a probational leave. However, in reality this sequence may often be deviated from. The current study was undertaken to examine the most common deviations and the relationship with how the treatment ended (e.g. positive/negative). File information of 422 offenders previously admitted to a high-secure forensic hospital was used. Deviations from the standard sequence are relatively common. Probational leave is often missing, and one in ten sequences contains a suspension of leave. The relevance for forensic and legal professionals is discussed.

In previous observational studies among operational police officers, some officers stated that if a victim is not willing to (officially) report a crime to the police, they are not able to police these cases. This rather cynical and fatalistic statement raises several questions. What do police officers mean when they say this? What do they actually do in those cases and why? In this paper we try to answer these questions based on explorative qualitative interviews with several police officers in two police teams in the Netherlands. The results show that even though police officers recognize these statements among their colleagues, they do not agree with them and in practice police officers show a lot of effort and involvement in these cases. In fact, police officers have several possible strategies available to deal with these cases. Which strategy they opt for depends on various pragmatic, organisational and moral considerations.

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.

Cooperation by professionals dealing with cases of stalking by former partners is complex. First and foremost professionals should focus on a shared ambition in order to stop stalking. But in order to achieve that goal partners in safety and security should be in the clear regarding practical matters: how do they consult each other? What appointments are made? How is invested in the development of a mutual relationship and the understanding of each other’s tasks?

Recently a project was started that aims to systematically describe and explain the developments in the Criminal Code for the period 1886 - 2017. This article presents the first results of this new project, called the Historical Criminal Code (HWvSr). An overview is given of the long-term developments in the structure – the ‘external’ structure – of the Second Book of the Criminal Code since 1886. The analyzes show that its scope has been substantially expanded over the last 130 years, but also that various articles and article parts have been deleted. The article describes the most important changes in terms of both quantity and content.