Criminal Justice Settings, Crime, and Reintegration

Criminal Justice Settings, Crime, and Re-integration: New directions for research

Monday 19^th of Feb: Introduction & Exchange with stakeholders

Tuesday 20^th of Feb – Thursday 22^nd of Feb: Multidisciplinary exchange & research agenda

Crime is a huge societal problem and crime prevention is a top priority within judicial policy. In life-course criminology, large research efforts are devoted to understanding within-individual developments in criminal behavior over time, explaining why this development takes place, and measuring the impact of criminal justice interventions. This line of work produced disappointing findings on the crime deterrent effects of sanctions and policy interventions and emphasized that desisting from crime is a too narrow definition of successful re-integration.

In recent years the availability of advanced methodological techniques and large-scale individual level administrative datasets provide a unique opportunity to build on a next generation of life course studies in criminology. Thus far, life-course criminology mostly relied on a fairly small number of longitudinal datasets from a small number of Western countries. In addition, while criminology is an interdisciplinary field of study, we may still suffer from “tunnel vision” when it comes to making use of advances in other academic fields. We believe that an interdisciplinary approach using the latest methodological developments and unique data from various countries is needed to overcome key challenges in existing studies. In this Lorentz workshop, we assemble the needs in this field of research, and identify new (comparative) research priorities.

The workshop brings together prominent (inter)national experts from various disciplines, including scholars and stakeholders, to develop a research agenda on the topic of the re-integration of criminal justice involved individuals. During the workshop we will discuss key questions to be tackled, and opportunities for theoretical and methodological innovation through interactive sessions and activities.