European Journal of Criminology

As an increasingly popular alternative to prison sentences, electronic monitoring is assumed to generate fewer side effects and to be more humane than imprisonment. While most research on electronic monitoring focuses on its financial or technical implications for penal policy, or on numbers and recidivism, this article analyses the experiences of 27 Belgian convicted offenders with electronic monitoring. Overall, most preferred electronic monitoring to prison, but this was not the case for all the offenders and every circumstance. These findings show that electronic monitoring cannot necessarily be considered a ‘softer’ alternative to imprisonment. The results imply that, as well as reducing over-population in prisons, electronic monitoring may contribute to a decrease in risks for society and the positive empowerment of offenders. Such empowerment can increase their chances of living a crime-free life, which means electronic monitoring can be considered an important step forward for offenders in regaining control over their own lives.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of psychopathic traits in the crime onset age of male juvenile delinquents. A group of early crime onset (n = 102), a group of late crime onset (n = 102), and a non-delinquent group (n = 102) were formed from a sample of 306 male youths from Portuguese juvenile detention centres and schools. Results showed that early crime onset participants scored higher on psychopathic measures, self-reported delinquency, crime seriousness and conduct disorder than late crime onset participants, and the non-delinquent participants. Psychopathic-traits scores showed significant associations with age of crime onset, age at first encounter with the law, age of first incarceration, self-reported delinquency, seriousness of crime and conduct disorder.

This article reports findings from a study investigating if, how and why concerns regarding risk are impacting on probation work in England and Wales from the practitioner perspective. It begins with a review of key debates regarding how ‘the rise of risk’ has come about and with what effects. I then briefly explain what the study entailed – its aims and objectives, methods and theoretical framework (governmentality). Findings from the study are then presented. These are at odds with the ‘critical consensus’ that risk has dramatically altered the nature of practice. The article concludes with discussion of the implications of these findings for ongoing debates regarding the significance of risk in probation practice.

Differential association and social learning theory assume delinquent peers to be instigators and reinforcers of delinquent behaviour and norms favourable of delinquency. Control theory, on the other hand, assumes that delinquents will group together with peers that share a common normative and behavioural background. Interactional theory as an integrative paradigm argues that both – influence and selection – processes might be active simultaneously and are embedded in a reciprocal causal relationship. This paper tests the reciprocity between the association with delinquent peer groups, the acceptance of pro-violent norms and violent delinquency during adolescence with data from a German longitudinal panel study in a longitudinal structural equation model. Results indicate that peers, norms and violence are interactionally related and that influence and selection processes are active simultaneously. Moreover, further structural dimensions are able to explain delinquent peer group association, the acceptance of pro-violent norms and violence in early adolescence.

Using a sample of males and females at high risk of offending, this study examines associations in criminal behaviour for married partners, over and above pre-existing levels of assortative mating in offending, as well as other individual and family characteristics. Interactions between partner’s criminal offending were analysed during first marriage using a longitudinal prospective design. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis for multiple failure-time data showed that both males and females have an immediate increased likelihood of committing an offence when the partner offends. Prolonged associations in offending were observed only for females up until the third month after their partner offended. For both males and females, results showed no long-term associations in partner’s offending.

The fact that young people report disproportionately high levels of offending has resulted in substantial criminological attention to the topic of young people as offenders. However, we tend to forget that victims of those young delinquents are largely young people as well. Moreover, not only are young people overrepresented in both offender and victim populations, there are equally remarkable similarities between the two populations. Despite the generally accepted homogeneity in victim and offender characteristics and their respective risk factors, little theory-driven empirical research has been conducted in an attempt to further explain this overlap. This study tries to fill this gap by focusing on the relationship between offending and victimization in a large sample of young people in the Brussels Capital Region (N = 2070). More specifically, the influence of risky lifestyles on the relationship between offending and victimization is studied in order to test the assumption that the offending–victimization overlap is in reality the result of the convergence in time and space of (groups of potential) offenders and victims.

Most studies about legal decision-making have been approached from a quantitative perspective and in the context of the Anglo-Saxon judicial tradition. Our study consists of a qualitative analysis of judges’ sentence pronouncements in Portuguese courts. Sentence pronouncements are the moment when the decision is made public and, therefore, judges have to select which elements must be highlighted to the defendant. This trial moment is not clearly defined by the law, which gives judges the opportunity to develop it as they consider appropriate. Our results show that judges mainly transmit legal explanations and judges’ viewpoints to offenders. The results also show that the structure and content of these oral presentations of sentencing show great variation among judges, panels of judges and situations.