Criminology in Europe

I am sure that you have all enjoyed this year’s European Society of Criminology conference in the beautiful city of Sarajevo. Once more, the conference was the perfect forum to meet each other and engage in the exchange of thoughts and ideas about what lives in criminology in Europe and beyond. I have found the Sarajevo conference particularly interesting because it brought us to a city and area in Europe that only some of us know or visit as criminologists.

It is a great honour for me to be the recipient of the 2018 ESC European Criminology Award for Lifetime Contribution to European Criminology; I feel that Sarajevo is a very special place to share this moment with my colleagues from all over Europe.

The word laudatum tends to evoke in me the phrase of Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar that ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; the evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones—so let it be with Caesar’. But that is not the case here. Susanne is very clever, of course, as have been all the winners and unsuccessful candidates for this award. However cleverness is a necessary but not a sufficient virtue.

Any notion that there is a distinctive pan-European approach to juvenile justice is a fallacy. Having completed an ambitious and detailed survey of 34 European jurisdictions, for example, Dünkel (2015: 49) reflects that ‘juvenile justice systems in Europe have developed in various forms and with different orientations’. He further observes that ‘in the past 25 years, [juvenile] justice systems in Europe have undergone considerable changes … [and] differing and sometimes contradictory [juvenile] justice policies have also emerged’ 

The Community Sanctions and Measures Working Group remains active and the membership continues to grow. In April 2018 we organised a meeting of the Working Group at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, University of Vienna, where members presented on current research.

Since its founding in 2006 the European working group on Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, or EDLC for short, has witnessed criminology fully embrace the life-course paradigm, with the subsequent formation of the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology in 2012, and the launch of the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology in 2015, as tell-tale signs of its growing importance to the field.