The Dutch Engagement with the Project of International Criminal Justice

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Duration of the time to reconviction: Evidence from UK prisoner discharge data

Duration models were used to investigate reconviction risks for a sample of 34,126 offenders released from prison in England and Wales during 1998. Different versions of the Cox proportional hazards model were applied to a comprehensive data set covering several offense types. Factors such as age (modelled using bands rather than a linear or quadratic format), gender, convictions-history, and offense type were found to be strongly associated with the risk of reconviction. Interactions between factors were also included and it was shown that the discrepancy between the risk of reconviction for males and females became weaker as the number of previous convictions increased. The study helped identify the subgroups of offenders for whom reconviction risks are greatest and the times when they seem to be most vulnerable to reconviction. Implications are explored for the design of prisoner resettlement programs and the prioritization of offenders for more intensive forms of intervention.     

Crime,detection rate,and the police: A macro approach

Dutch criminality and its relation to the performance of police and justice have only recently been analyzed at the macro level (e.g., at the level of municipalities or the whole country). This type of approach is a useful supplement to analyses at the micro level (that of individuals), which are more common in Dutch empirical criminological research. The main results of such a macro approach are presented in this article. We conclude that the per capita numbers of youth, divorced people, and unemployed contribute significantly to the crime rate. The police strength and solving rates are important factors as well. Analysis of the production process of the police reveals that detecting one more case of driving under the influence is far more expensive than solving one more other crime or handling one more traffic accident. The results are combined to sketch a cost-benefit approach of different strategies in allocating more resources to the police. Allocating extra resources to solving more cases of vandalism gives the best cost-benefit ratio.