Over the last twenty years, research on desistance from crime and on restorative justice has grown rapidly and both have emerged as exciting, vibrant, and dynamic areas of contemporary criminological interest. While the implementation of restorative justice practices in Europe has been essentially victim-oriented, there has always also been an emphasis on including the moral and social rehabilitation of the offender. This more offender-centred approach to restorative justice and its practices is not limited to the evaluation of its ability to reduce crime, but is to be seen within the connection between reparation, resettlement (reintegration into the community after sentence), and desistance from crime. This article examines, from a broad perspective, but including some data from research on victim-offender mediation in prison, the capacity of restorative justice interventions to impact positively on offenders’ likelihood of stopping committing criminal offences.

The nexus between religion and law is an important subject of comparative law. This paper, however, finds that the majority of comparative theorists rely on the immanent frame; that legal legitimacy can and should be separated from any objective truth or moral norm. But the fact of the matter is many constitutional systems were founded based on a complicated mixture between the transcendent and immanent frame. Whereas in the immanent frame, human actions are considered self-constituting, in the transcendent frame, human actions were judged in light of their correspondence to higher, divine laws and purposes.
This article argues that it is not sufficient for comparative theorists to offer a perspective from the immanent frame. Comparative theorists in law and religion should understand at least basic religious doctrines and know how to systematize those doctrines. In other words, comparative theorist of law and religion should work within the transcendent frame. By using a transcendent frame, comparative theorists will be able to excavate the underlying structure of religion, and so they will understand better how theological ideas influence law. Furthermore, this paper will also present a thought experiment in applying the transcendent frame in comparative constitutional studies.

This article focuses on the challenges facing Community Oriented Policing (COP) in an increasingly complex society. The authors describe how the Dutch police adresses this context through a new police organisation on a national basis, specified job protocols, intelligence led policing and higher educated specialists. Seeking for alternatives the authors argue that COP should be based on a problem centered approach which profits from the insights of local policemen and operational specialists. Adressing ambiguous problems will fail when only applying system logic. Instead, moral involvement and sensemaking are indispensable.

The term ‘Judeo Christian civilization’ dates from the second half of the twentieth century, but has of recent gained in popularity with politicians and policy makers. It seems to be no coincidence that this has a direct correlation with the debates on the position of Islam in Europe. This article is a critical assessment of the meanings of the various elements of this term: what is so Christian about European civilization, what is Judaism’s part therein, and what role does the Islam play? It is notable that one often considers this Judeo Christian ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ as an uninterupted historical proces, while the second half of the twentieth century shows a clear rupture when it concerns values or the experience of religion. Also remarkable is that one often fails to make the differentiation between religion as a theological cult and as a culture carrier, or between the principles and the practice of a religion. As a consequence, the term ‘Judeo Christian civilization’ or ‘culture’ is being used in a very sloppy or selective manner, often with the purpose to exclude Islam.

‘Volksbuurten’ (marginal neighborhoods) in Brabant emerged from poverty and backwardness, but have developed their own way to deal with it. ‘Deviant behavior’, including forms of illegal and criminal activity, is important in there. That behavior gradually gets sustainable features. These neighborhoods are usually the result of conscious and active government policy; in particular the approach of ‘antisocial behavior’ in the forties and fifties of the last century has been important. In this article the author first sketches the outlines of this particular ‘volksbuurten’ culture, to focus then on the history of a particular street in one of those neighborhoods and its culture around 1960: the Ruisvoornstraat in Tilburg. Knowledge of the history of these neighborhoods is one of the keys to understanding the specifics of the history of Brabant and its partial intertwining with a culture of acting illegally and criminally.

Many scholars interpreted the lifting of the ban on brothels in 2000 (often called the legalization of prostitution) in The Netherlands, as a sign that selling sex was no longer deemed morally objectionable. Governing prostitution thus became primarily a technical matter of government. A task that, for a large part, was delegated to municipalities. However, nearly two decades later, the debate surrounding prostitution (policy) is still characterized by its moral tone of voice, and we lack insight into the strategies and techniques deployed by local governments. This raises two important questions. First, what actually happens in legalized local prostitution markets? Extant research, focusses too much on (changes in) national policy, and too little on what key actors (such as municipalities) are actually doing in local prostitution markets. Second, what is the role of moral aspects? When local actors are studied, insufficient attention is paid to the influence of moral issues. My PhD research addresses these two questions, by looking at the relationship between moral beliefs surrounding prostitution and the way in which local governments attempt to stabilize or change the modus operandi of a local prostitution market. It develops a theoretical framework combining field theory and Foucauldian governmentality concepts, and tries to shed light on the broader theme of the relation between morality and governing in late modern times.