Latest Issue
2022 - 2
Presidential Message
This year, finally we will have a real, ‘physical’ ESC conference!! If things stay as they are, we will not have to wear face-masks, we can sit together, we will flock from meeting room to meeting room. We will be able to have a beer, wine or other drink in the sultry Andalusian evenings, with friends, colleagues that we haven’t seen for much too long. The fact that this year we do not look at a two-dimensional screens and talk into cyberspace, but see each other three-dimensionally is by itself cause for joy.
ESC Executive Secretariat Annual Report 2021
In 2021, the European Society of Criminology (ESC) had 543 members, and 461 of them took place in the 21th Annual Meeting of the ESC, organized online from 8 to 10 September with the collaboration of the ESC Working Groups. Four different awards were presented during the conference. Loraine Gelsthorpe received the 2021 European Criminology Award; Janna Verbruggen, Arjan Blokland, Amanda L Robinson and Christopher D Maxwell received the European Journal of Criminology Best Article of the Year 2020 Award; Anita Lavorgna received the 2021 ESC Early Career Award; and Fergus McNeill received the 2021 ESC Book Award. Through an electronic voting, the ESC members appointed Klaus Boers as President-Elect, Barbora Hola as At-large Board member, and Uberto Gatti as Auditor. At the end of the conference, Catrien Bijleveld took office as President of the ESC, replacing Aleksandras Dobryninas until the end of the next conference.
Candidate for ESC President: Josep M. Tamarit Sumalla
I strongly believe that the ESC can play a key role stimulating and supporting researchers in all the areas of Criminology and that’s why I would feel highly honored if my colleagues gave me the opportunity to take part in this exciting common project in the front row. The Annual European Criminology Conference and the European Journal of Criminology are successful achievements that must be carefully supported, without missing the promising advances of the working groups. Beyond them, we all will need to define new challenges in order to strengthen career development, capacitation and research in those European countries in which greater difficulties are detected, due to the war, the weaknesses of democratic institutions or a low economic development. Young researchers and professionals should see in the ESC a supporting and strong resource to elaborate their projects and ambitions, thus contributing to a better future for our countries.
Canddiate for At-Large Board Membership: Ineke Haen Marshall
As a person with citizenship in the Netherlands (where I grew up) as well as in the US (where I have lived and worked since), I always have been keenly interested in the often puzzling, but always interesting tensions, contradictions and agreements between Europe (writ large) and the USA. In an essay I wrote more than 20 years ago I speculated about the similarities and differences between ‘European criminology’ and the American criminological enterprise. 1 Writing that essay was truly a pleasure, since it gave me an opportunity to critically assess my lived experiences as a US-based criminologist fully immersed in the ‘American way’ of doing criminology, against the context of my ongoing involvement in different European-based projects and experiences. Since I wrote that essay more than two decades ago a lot has changed in our discipline, not in small part due to the leadership of the European Society of Criminology in advancing the growth of methodological and theoretical knowledge through bringing scholars together from across Europe and beyond, producing a high-quality journal, organizing diverse and intellectually stimulating annual meetings, instituting awards, and sponsoring a large number of working groups. What has remained unchanged, however, is the mission of the ESC as a normative project (as past ESC-president Lesley McAra has reminded us2) which – I dare to say - distinguishes the ESC from its big sister organization ASC. I do appreciate being nominated as a candidate for this position and – if elected – I will do my very best to contribute to the continued success of the ESC as a key factor in enhancing the social impact of criminology, in Europe and beyond.
Candidate for At-Large Board Membership: Theoni Spathi
My name is Theoni Spathi and I am a criminologist/researcher, holding two bachelor degrees, one from the Department of Economics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (BA in Business Economics and Finance, 2006) where I entered with a honorary fellowship for ranking 1st in University entrance exams in the field of Economics, among all other student-applicants, and another one from the Law Faculty of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA in Law, 2011), where I managed to complete my studies at a period of three years. I continued my studies at a graduate level in the field of Criminology, having received two Masters of Science, one from University College London (MSc in Crime Science, 2012) and another one from the University of Leicester (MSc in Forensic Science and Criminal Justice, 2015).
Working Group Report - ESC Working Group of Juvenile Justice
Not unlike many other ESC Working Groups, Covid 19 has served to slow - but not to stop - our activities over the period 2019-22.
Working Group Report - ESC Working Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justicew
In the years 2020-2022, working group activities were naturally limited by the global pandemic. The ECACTJ group members, however, enthusiastically participated in the two online conferences hosted by the ESC during the COVID pandemic.
Working Group Report - European Historical Criminology Working Group
Before the pandemic hit we had begun planning the regular activities of the working group. We held a member survey to map their opinions of the hoped activities of the working group. The main takeaways were a regular newsletter with a publication list and a regular event for historical criminologists with moving institution responsibility. However, the pandemic effectively grinded our new activities to a halt so we are back at the drawing board.
Working Group Report - European Working Group on Organisational Crime
EUROC’s last report was in early 2019 and despite the impact COVID caused in a variety of spheres, the EUROC working group did not lose its dynamics and its board continued working hard in maintaining its presence and activities in Europe and elsewhere.
Working Group Report - ESC Working Group on Immigration, Crime, and Citizenship
Scholarly explorations on the interlinking of immigration, crime, and punishment, elaborated from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, have proliferated across Europe in recent years. They have portrayed the marked diversity of human mobility phenomena in the old continent, as well as the varied ways in which they interact with crime phenomena and are tackled by punitive strategies. In this framework, despite (or thanks to) the possibility of organizing only on-line academic activities during this last two years, the Working Group (WG) on Immigration, Crime, and Citizenship has consolidated a flourishing academic community, being a critical site for academic collaboration.
Is Spain a socially exclusionary country for criminal offenders?
Social exclusion as an effect of criminal policy has not been questioned in academic debates, although they mostly focus on punitiveness as an essential feature of contemporary criminal policy. However, the use of this guiding criterion in the study of comparative criminal policy shows a set of theoretical and methodological flaws (Díez-Ripollés, 2011 and 2013).