Een Vlaamse spiegel - Nederlandse Vereniging voor Kriminologie

Roaming offender groups – rational Dutch criminologists and irrational
criminals in Flanders
Ponsaers
‘Roaming offender groups’ are high on the political agenda in Belgium.
Though an anomaly, they may shatter a number of criminological accepted
wisdoms and should make Dutch criminologists rethink some theory. Dutch
criminology is influenced by theories linked to the ‘rational choice perspective’
of offenders. What does the phenomenon mean for central suppositions in
theory building and empirical research, such as modelling rational choice
behaviour as individual choice behaviour and allocating a central role to the
residential address of the offender?
In Rembrandt’s country – group portrait of a company of guardians
Cools
Dutch scientific criminological interest towards commercial private policing
and security in the 1970’s and 1980’s was based on a general distrust of
the security industry, due to political experiences with private political
organisations. This critical view changed into more international and policydriven
thinking in the 1990s. Today Leiden and Nijenrode universities are
creating a scientific network on forensic business studies and accountancy, and
dominate scientific research. Nevertheless the bridge to a ‘law and economics
approach’ has not yet been crossed, and private intelligence studies will be one
of the future challenges. Recent evolution in the Netherlands is the result of a
home-made effort, and research is less prejudiced than in Flanders.
Conditional release in the Netherlands and Belgium
Goethals & Maes
Both the Netherlands and Belgium passed their conditional release legislation
quasi-simultaneously at the end of the 19 th century. In Belgium, parole legislation
remained quite stable, but in the Netherlands it was abrogated in 1986, with
the substitution of conditional release by fixed parole. Nowadays, Dutch plans
to reintroduce a model of conditional release offer interesting research perspectives
in both countries, from a legal and an empirical perspective. Dutch
researchers will be offered the opportunity to examine the problems and
successes of both systems, such as whether discretionary conditional release,
in contrast to fixed parole, leads to a decrease in recidivism.
This may allow the establishment of a number of distinguishing factors:
between parole success and failure; the effects from the discretionary character
of granting parole in contrast to fixed conditional parole; the decision-making
processes, underlying parole decision-making from a perspective of product
and process; and the impact of the new system on prison capacity. All these
(new) research questions can be approached from a national, but, more
interestingly, also from an international comparative perspective, e.g. Belgium
- Netherlands.
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