While research has increasingly focused on the role of digitalisation in prisoners’ detention experiences, the impact of the digitalisation of the prison regime on the discretionary power of prison officers has been understudied. By using an ethnographic approach in one digital Belgian prison, qualitative interview data are used to investigate the prison officer’s coping strategies in response to the digitalisation of prison life. It is found that the gatekeeping role of prison officer’s has been partly stripped away but also that the impact of digitalisation on the prison officer’s discretionary power depends on how digital technologies are implemented. Moreover, the study reveals that not all official goals regarding the digitalisation are met and highlights the need of supporting prison officers when implementing new technologies in prison.

Hartendorp emphasizes in his contribution that a judge is a decision-maker bound by the law. He agrees with Klijn that this position makes it difficult to act as a problem solver. However, this does not alter the fact that, in order to act effectively, a judge must have a dual orientation on the conflict and the dispute between the parties. The Judiciary can only increase its social effectiveness if it manages to bring about a synthesis between its classic decisive task and an orientation aimed at effectiveness.

Recently there have been several miscarriages of justice in the Netherlands, which were widely reported in the media. They show that much can go wrong with legal proof in criminal cases and that judges sometimes give limited justification for their decisions. Insights from the so-called story-based approach to legal proof can potentially assist to improve and to critically assess judicial decisions in criminal cases, thereby helping to reduce the chance of mistakes. The story-based approach involves constructing and critically analyzing at least two stories about what (might have) happened in a case that explain the evidential data. These stories have to be compared to each other in order to decide which story is the most plausible. The judge has to include the different scenarios in his judgment and he must explain why the scenario he had chosen is the most plausible. In my paper I first discuss why it is important that judges justify their decision in a verdict. Then I explicate the story based approach. After that I explain how applying the story based approach in the motivation can be useful and help to reduce the chance of a miscarriage of justice.

The distance between the public and the judiciary takes two forms: a punitivity gap and an accessibility gap. This article discusses both types of gap and elaborates on the issue of whether the existence of these gaps influences confidence in the judiciary. From the literature, it appears that the public is generally of the opinion that courts sentence too leniently. However, experiments show that when citizens receive information on a specific case, they become less punitive. Information provision may also help to bridge an accessibility gap, as does actual citizen involvement in the administration of justice. The relation between the gaps discussed and confidence in the judiciary is not clear as yet. The article discusses methods generally used to assess confidence and suggests that confidence may be increased by a reduction of the two gaps.

In this contribution it has been set out that trust in the Belgian justice system cannot be taken for granted. The article contains empirical research on the reporting of newspapers on the Belgian justice system and tries to uncover a possible causal relationship between reading certain newspapers and trust in the justice system. Although it turns out that quality newspapers report on the justice system in a more negative way, readers of popular papers have less trust in the justice system. A direct link between negative reporting and reduced trust was therefore not found. Socio-economic variables and the priming effect on punitive attitudes in popular newspapers are cited as possible explanations.

Transparency of institutions like the judiciary is often assumed to increase confidence. However, a recent survey concerning opinions about the judiciary showed that in many cases one trusts the judiciary without having any special interest in the judiciary itself. It revealed that confidence in the judiciary depends on various factors like anomy, social trust, general institutional trust, personal experience and feelings about a fair chance in a hypothetical case for court. And transparency will not easily change these factors. Furthermore, providing information can both strengthen and weaken confidence due to the personal backgrounds of those receiving the information. Finally, this paper discusses whether strategic and positive information that is needed to increase confidence allows for drawing one’s own conclusions as transparency promises.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

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.

A large share of policy interventions in the Netherlands is captured in laws. Despite the growing piles of evaluations of laws, a clear picture of the overall proceeds of laws is lacking so far. This contribution contains the results of a synthesis investigation into a large number of Dutch evaluations of laws. We collected 75 evaluation reports that were completed in the period 1998-2005, covering a variety of policy domains. We performed our synthesis on 59 methodologically sound reports, using a realist evaluation framework. First, we unravelled the various interventions in laws. We found that most interventions were directed at executive bodies rather than citizens or businesses. We also found that only part of the end objectives of laws were actually achieved.

In line with the realist evaluation approach, we then attempted to map out the chains of events (mechanisms) produced by interventions in laws. We found that many evaluations lacked an explicit reconstruction of these chains of events. Nevertheless, we found eleven basic mechanisms, for example ‘agencification’ and ‘self-management’, to recur across laws and across policy domains. Finally, we synthesised findings relating to the influence of context on the functioning of laws. We found, for example, that adjacent rules and regulations as well as managerial cultures inside implementing bodies affected the functioning of various laws to a significant degree.