As COVID-19 spreads through prisons, governments are focusing on public safety rather than the health and human rights of people in prison – and it is resulting in irresponsible and unfair policies.
On Thursday
May 7, 2020 dr. Teun van Ruitenburg defended his PhD thesis digitally. His thesis, titled Raising Moral Barriers. An empirical study on the Dutch approach of outlaw motorcycle gangs, provides insights in the question how the Dutch government’s approach to biker gangs has developed from the 1970s to the present. We recently interviewed him to inquire about the focus and results of his PhD studies.
“Keeping it real” is considered to be one of rap’s mantras and reflects the musical genre’s longstanding and complex relation with authenticity. The authenticity of rap artists – or “realness”, to put it into rap and street vernacular – tends to hinge on whether rappers (still) have a connection to the streets. In this blog post, Robby Roks reflects on the recent controversy surrounding Brooklyn rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine to explore the performativity of street credibility, and the intertwinement of rap music, the streets, gangs, violence, and law enforcement agencies.
In this blog post, Anna Merz explores the 2019 film Dark Waters from a criminological perspective. Based on the New York Times Magazine’s article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare”, the film portrays attorney Rob Bilott (starred by Mark Ruffalo) and his legal fight against chemical giant DuPont for knowingly polluting the environment and endangering workers and society’s health. Dark Waters provides insights into the power struggle as a natural corollary of corporate crimes and the pitfalls of (self-)regulation.
In this blog post Sifra Matthijsse discusses a few criminogenic factors that are unique to the online context, and the implications of these factors for appropriate and effective interventions for cyber offenders. [...]
In this blog post (in the form of a diary entry), Marilena Drymioti provides some reflections on the coronavirus pandemic and the looming economic crisis as it relates to her analysis of structural violence: "The current pandemic is as much a question of health as it is one of ideology, politics and economics." [...]