Illegal stay in the Netherlands is increasingly criminalized through new measurements and adaptations of the Aliens Law. In order to understand the incorporation of illegal immigrants in this restrictive political context, the ‘moral economy’ is introduced as a concept referring to the norms and expectations regarding justice and reciprocity that serve as guidelines for daily illegal live. This process of crimmigration minimalizes the opportunities of illegal immigrants and as an unintended consequence will push the illegal immigrants further towards charity, informal labour or crime. Paradoxically, illegal immigrants will become more vulnerable for exploitation instead of returning home as was intended.

The attitude towards ‘the immigrant’ is changing. Where they used to be seen as a necessity, they are now looked upon with distrust. A consequence of this new attitude is the ‘merging’ of immigration law policy and criminal law. Examples of this in the Netherlands are a law proposal to criminalize illegal stay and a mandatory quorum of illegals that have to be deported each year. In our research we have compared the ‘crimmigration’ discourse in both Arizona and the Netherlands.
Arizona’s law SB1070 has been the main legal focus in the research. The enactment of the law has been cause of many protests. The public’s fear was focused mainly on civil rights violations; the legal discussion was focused on the federalism issue, brought to Courts by the Obama administration. However, with the Supreme Court handing down its landmark decision in Arizona vs. United States, the legal focus will shift towards the civil rights spectrum.
In the most recent elections in the Netherlands, the immigration question seems to have been pushed to the background. However, it remains a vital issue when placed in the context of ‘Euro-skepticism’, which has played a major role , as much of the immigration policy making is done by the supra national European legislator.
We have seen that in the American context the federal government has been a ‘mitigating factor’ in the crimmigration debate to counterbalance draconian immigration policy. We hope that despite recent Euro-skepticism the EU will have a similar mitigating effect.

Dutch local governments increasingly decide to contract private security officers for surveillance and enforcement tasks in the public space. This article presents an analysis of the daily work of these private security officers. Local governments contract these private workers because they are faced with problems of social disorder and crime. Although the police should formally manage the work of these private security workers, in practice this task is hardly realized. These private workers are faced with four problems: their work is boring, they are uncertain about what they are expected to do, don’t know exactly what their formal powers are, and are unsatisfied about their lack of means for self-defence. Although they don’t differ in their work style from their public colleagues, their position as private worker and the flexible job they have, are hard to reconcile with what they are expected to do (like reassuring citizens).

Private security is traditionally a highly fragmented industry with a national focus. However, with the arrival of multinational brands in the market such as Group 4 Securicor and Securitas, we are witnessing a rise of global private security. After providing the latest statistics on the growth of this industry in the Netherlands, the authors give examples of how private security is evolving throughout the world. Issues that are further addressed include the opportunities and challenges (multinational) private security companies present to the Netherlands.

The period of austerity which most of Europe is now experiencing is for the first time impacting on law and orders services, particularly the police service. This article gives an overview of the debate in England and Wales on the decision of the Coalition government to cut 20% to police spending and police numbers. An important instrument to reach this goal is the private outsourcing of tasks performed in the back office. The author discusses the public views on the performance and reliability of private security companies. Also the high rise of public police expenses are discussed against the background of declining crime levels.

The author analyses and compares several distinct models of doing justice to find out which is serving ‘sustainable justice’ the best. Sustainable justice could be defined as justice that produces conflict resolutions that last for a long time and in this way contribute to a more sustainable society. Modern developmental methods for organisations make use of assessments to measure, compare and improve the effectiveness of organizational cultures. These methods are used in this contribution to analyse the organizational cultures of mediation, the traditional accusatorial (penal) procedure, problem-solving courts (with a focus on drug courts) and restorative justice conferencing. The comparison results in conclusions indicating that mediation and problem solving courts have a sound and effective organizational culture, due to healthy conflict management styles, characterized by managing both opposition and competition constructively and by a stimulating person-oriented focus. Restorative justice conferences bring together many stakeholders in a conflict and its resolution and facilitates in this way the awareness of the connections between many problems behind the actual conflict at hand: for this reason the resolutions may have a deeper societal impact and a greater sustainability.

To what extent do private security workers have a culture that is comparable to the police culture? To what extent can such a private security culture be explained by the use of the so-mentioned stress-coping model of police culture? This comparative survey of a sample of private security workers and a sample of police officers shows that contrary to popular assumptions of increasing similarities between police and private security cultures, in reality there are important differences. Private security workers have a much stronger focus on service tasks than police officers and are less oriented to crime fighting. The stress factors that contribute to a stronger police culture, can also contribute to a similar culture in private security. However, because these stress factors are much less prominent in private security, it may be assumed that such a police-like culture is almost absent among private security workers.

In the opening section the author refers to the classical book of Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger on the links between poverty/social injustice and levels of crime. He then introduces his own work on the International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS) since 1989. The ICVS trend data on crime in Western countries during 1989 up to 2010 show a curvilinear movement peaking around 2000. The upward trend seems to track economic growth and to have mainly been caused by increased opportunities of crime. His analytical results concerning car theft and household burglary suggest that the international falls in crime since 2000 are largely caused by improved security. A comparative analysis shows for example that burglary rates have fallen in countries with high levels of home security such as Great Britain and the Netherlands and have continued to rise in low security countries such as Denmark and Switzerland. The author concludes that criminology has evolved both methodologically and theoretically since the publication of Bonger’s book in 1905. Some fundamental principles of the discipline, however, appear to have remained unchanged. Van Dijk’s own work is, just like that of Bonger, policy- oriented. It is driven by the motivation to assist governments in finding better ways to reduce suffering of human beings from crime, either as victims or as offenders.

This paper studies the effects of legal street prostitution zones (tippelzones) on crime. In the past decade some cities closed their tippelzone, while other cities opened one. We use data on both registered crime and crime perception. The results from our difference-in-difference model show that tippelzones decrease registered crime but increase perceived crime. The effects of closing are larger than the effects of opening a tippelzone.

Since the publication of a special issue in TvC (the Dutch Journal of Criminology) on the spatial distribution of crime, about fifteen years ago, a vast number of developments have been observed in the field of social ecology and environmental criminology. During this period many studies have been undertaken in the Netherlands and Belgium. However, there still is room for progress, e.g. through the study of new contexts beyond the traditional boundaries of residential neighbourhoods and through the use of promising new methodologies and technological developments. This special issue provides some examples of such innovative research on environmental influences on crime. In this introductory article the authors provide an overview of the background of the theme, and discuss recent theoretical and methodological developments. They move on to discuss contemporary studies that have been carried out in the Netherlands and Belgium, and outline some desirable and necessary future developments. Finally, the authors provide the reader with an overview of the other contributions to this special issue.

The present study investigates the existence of independent effects of community level social processes on fear of crime. Attention is paid to social trust and informal control, two dimensions of Sampson’s famous concept of collective efficacy. The model is tested on three well-known dimensions of fear of crime: perceived risk of victimisation, emotional fear and avoidance behaviour. The results suggest an independent effect of neighbourhood social trust on all three dimensions, when control is hold for demographic background variables and individual levels of social capital. The effect of neighbourhood social trust is mediated by neighbourhood disorder.

Felson introduced the concept of offender convergence settings in his articles on situational crime prevention. He refers to physical locations where criminals get together to relax, share information, fence stolen goods, plot new crimes, etc. Such places come in the form of restaurants and cafes that are in the hands of the ‘underworld’, but may equally well consist of deserted schoolyards where unruly adolescents gather. According to Felson, such settings facilitate the committing of crimes and enable the creation of structure and continuity in criminal networks.
In this article the authors argue that virtual meeting places also exist that can be labeled as offender convergence settings. To demonstrate this, a case study regarding a so-called ‘carding’ forum is used. Carding is a term from the world of cybercrime and refers to the set of techniques by which personal financial information is acquired, traded and abused by criminals. Through a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the carding forum, the possibilities for cyber criminals to come into contact with each other, co-offending, and the durability of the criminal network is analyzed.

Criminological research on perceptions and behavior in an environmental context, scarcely uses virtual environments. Such virtual environments are available on the Internet or can be created. They can be presented to research participants either online or in a laboratory setting. This article gives a brief overview of criminological studies employing a virtual environment and describes a case study that used a virtual environment in order to investigate disorder. Despite the pitfalls, there are certainly possibilities for (criminological) research in virtual environments. The spatial context provided by a virtual environment, seems suitable for research in environmental criminology in particular.

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 biographies a structure perspective is common to place the key person in a context of time and place. Apart from opportunities and obstacles, also cultural frames for interpretation vary with context. In this article a second, interaction perspective is added. This can best be applied if the key person cooperates in the research and if an emic approach is used. A recent life history of Jan Hoolwerf demonstrates how the key person comes to various presentations of self that can be understood as poses that fit specific settings.

The central question of this article is whether biographies can be a source for criminological research on white-collar crime and how they can contribute to the explanation of white-collar crime. To answer this question, 35 Dutch biographies were studied. Following the legal ambiguities of white-collar crime, not all of these biographies are about criminal offences. And following the dominant anthropomorphic approach to corporate crime, some of these are corporate biographies. Many biographies confirm current criminological explanations of the causation of white-collar crime. Yet, biographies also offer additional insights, for instance about the causal relevance of the private life of white-collar offenders.