Criminology in Europe

In brief

In 2018, the European Society of Criminology (ESC) had 1,198 members, of which 22% were students. The 18th Annual Meeting of the Society took place in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 29 August to 1 September 2018 and attracted 1,203 participants, of which 74% were ESC members. During the conference, Susanne Karstedt received the 2018 European Criminology Award and Anastasia Chamberlen the 2018 ESC Young Criminologist Award. Three fellowships to attend the conference were awarded to young criminologists from Eastern Europe. The General Assembly elected Lesley McAra as President-Elect, Effi Lambropoulou as At-Large Board member, and Daniel Fink as Auditor. The General Assembly introduced a modification to Section 7 of the Constitution, which deals with the budget and financial obligations of the Society and adopted four new ESC awards that will be introduced in the upcoming years. The day following the General Assembly, Tom Vander Beken took office as President of the ESC, replacing Gorazd Meško. Tom will remain President until the end of the next conference, which will take place in Ghent, Belgium from 18 to 21 September 2019.

Conference participation and ESC membership

The 18th Annual Meeting of the ESC took place in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 29 August to 1 September 2018. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the number of participants at ESC conferences from 2004 to 2018, as well as the number of ESC members during the same period. If we concentrate on the first indicator, it can be seen that Sarajevo, with 1,203 registered participants, was the second most successful conference of the ESC, after Porto in 2015. Among the participants in Sarajevo, there were 294 students (24% of the total) as well as 307 participants that were not members of the ESC (26% of the total). These two percentages overlap because, among the non-members, 87 were students.

Figure 1 also shows that the number of participants in Sarajevo remained over 1,000, as has been the case at the latest six conferences of the ESC, since Budapest 2013.These figures must be taken into consideration when submitting applications to host future ESC conferences. The cities that will host the next few conferences were decided last year—Bucharest (Romania) in 2020, Florence (Italy) in 2021, and Malaga (Spain) in 2022. The ESC Board will soon start encouraging new applications for 2023 onwards.

Figure 1. Participants in the ESC Annual Meetings and members of the ESC from 2004 to 2018

In terms of affiliation, in 2018 the ESC had 1,198 members. Since 2013, the trends in the membership of the ESC and in the participation in the conferences are quite similar. In addition, the fact that roughly one-fourth (26%) of the participants at the 2018 Sarajevo conference were not members of the ESC means that, in 2018, there were 1,505 criminologists linked to the ESC in one way or another (1,198 members plus the 307 non-members that attended the conference).

Figure 2. Members of the European Society of Criminology from 2004 to 2018, by status, in percentages

Among the 2018 ESC members, there were 258 students, which represent 22% of the total. Figure 2 presents the evolution of that percentage from 2014 to 2018. It can be seen that every year between one-fifth and one-fourth of the ESC members are students. As we have pointed out in previous Annual Reports, this trend suggests that it is plausible to hypothesise that a part of the growth of the membership of the ESC since its creation is explained by the transformation of former member students in full members. At the same time, the stability of the percentage of students is a powerful indicator of the constant renewal of European criminology.

In 2018, ESC members came from 52 countries (55, if figures for the United Kingdom are broken down by nations), covering five continents. The United Kingdom remained the most well-represented country with 243 members, followed by Germany (119 members), the Netherlands (96), the United States of America (81), Belgium (78), Italy (63), Spain and Switzerland (both with 54), Sweden (37), Poland (31), Australia and Norway (27), Canada and Ireland (22), Bosnia and Herzegovina (19), Hungary, Israel and Japan (18), Croatia, Portugal and Slovenia (16), Austria (14), Finland and Greece (12), the Czech Republic and Denmark (9), France (8), Lithuania and Romania (6), Korea, Serbia and Turkey (4), China, Iceland and Slovakia (3), Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Luxembourg, Malta, North Macedonia, Peru and Taiwan (2), and Colombia, Estonia, Georgia, Iran, Kenya, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay with one member each.

Figure 3 presents the average annual number of ESC members by country from 2013 (i.e. the year in which the ESC started having more than 1,000 members per year) to 2018. The Figure includes only the 26 countries that had an annual average of at least 10 members. It can be seen that the United Kingdom provided the largest number of members (roughly 250 per year), followed by Germany (roughly 110). Then, several groups can be identified: one with three countries that provided roughly 80 members per year and country (the United States of America, the Netherlands and Belgium); another one with three countries that provided roughly 55 members per year (Switzerland, Spain and Italy); a third one with six countries that provided roughly 25 members per year (Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Australia, Poland and Hungary); a fourth one with six countries that provided roughly 15 members per year (Ireland, Canada, Austria, Greece, Israel and Finland) and the last one with six countries that provided roughly 11 members per year (Slovenia, France, Japan, Denmark, Croatia and the Czech Republic. The aim of Figure 3 is not to establish direct comparisons between countries, because that would require weighting the number of members by the population of the country or by a relevant indicator of the development of criminology in the country, such as the number of programs in criminology or the number of publications in criminology journals.

Figure 3. Average annual number of ESC members by country from 2013 to 2018 (top twenty-six countries)

2018 European Criminology Award

Susanne Karstedt, former professor at the universities of Keele and Leeds in the United Kingdom, and currently professor at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, received the 2018 ESC European Criminology Award in recognition of her lifetime contribution to criminology.

The award committee—composed of former ESC presidents Frieder Dünkel (Chair, University of Greifswald, Germany), Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović (University of Belgrade, Serbia), and Rossella Selmini (University of Minnesota, United States of America)—considered that:

Professor Karstedt is a recognized leader and innovator in three substantially different emerging fields: quantitative cross-national studies of crime and criminal justice system operations; the roles of emotion in criminal justice; and problems of crime, including atrocities, in transitional societies. She has contributed seminal works and lectured widely on each. Her research and overall work related to state crime and transitional justice is of special importance. Professor Karstedt has explored the unique European experience of state crime across the past century, and the leading role of Europe in addressing and preventing atrocity crimes. Her work has relevance for different parts of Europe, including newly-established post-communist and post-conflict countries, but it also has wider international/global relevance and impact. She was a co-founder and presently is one of the chairs of the European Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice of the ESC.

The Awards Ceremony took place during the ESC conference in Sarajevo, and the laudatio of the awardee was delivered by Michael Levi (University of Cardiff, Wales). The acceptance speech by Susanne Karstedt, entitled ‘Is “big picture criminology” policy relevant’, was published in issue 2018/3 of the Newsletter of the ESC, Criminology in Europe, together with the laudatio by Michael Levi.

2018 ESC Young Criminologist Award

Anastasia Chamberlen (University of Warwick, United Kingdom) received the 2018 ESC Young Criminologist Award in recognition of her article ‘Embodying Prison Pain: Women’s experiences of self-injury in prison and the emotions of punishment’, published in 2016 in Theoretical Criminology (Vol. 20, Issue 2).

The award committee—composed of Janne Kivivuori (Chair, University of Helsinki, Finland), Dario Melossi (University of Bologna, Italy), and Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac (University of Zagreb, Croatia)—considered that in her article:

Anastasia Chamberlen explores the meanings and motivations of self-injury practices as disclosed in interviews with a small group of female former prisoners in England. In considering their testimonies through a feminist perspective, she illuminates aspects of their experiences of imprisonment that go beyond the ‘pains of imprisonment’ literature. Specifically, she examines their accounts of self-injury with a focus on the embodied aspects of their experiences. In so doing, she highlights the materiality of the emotional harms of their prison experiences and suggests that the pains of imprisonment are still very much inscribed on and expressed through the prisoner’s body. This paper advances a more theoretically situated, interdisciplinary critique of punishment drawn from medical sociological, phenomenological and feminist scholarship. The committee particularly emphasizes the comparative strengths of the paper regarding originality of its research question, interdisciplinary approach, methodology (qualitative) and clarity of thought through excellent expression.

The Awards Ceremony took place during the ESC conference in Sarajevo, and the laudatio of the awardee was delivered by Henrique Carvalho (University of Warwick, United Kingdom).

Fellowships to attend the 18th Annual Meeting of the ESC

In 2018, the ESC granted three fellowships to attend the ESC conference in Sarajevo. The fellowships were granted to Temur Gugushvili (Georgia), Julija Jurtoska (North Macedonia) and Angelina Stanojoska (North Macedonia). Adanela Musaraj (Albania) had also been granted a fellowship, but could not attend the conference for personal reasons.

The panel that awarded the fellowships was composed of composed by Helmut Kury (Chair, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany, chair), Eva Inzelt (ELTE Faculty of Law, Budapest, Hungary), and José Angel Brandariz (University of A Coruna, Spain).

European Criminology Oral History Project (ECOH)

The third wave of interviews for the European Criminology Oral History Project (ECOH) took place during the ESC conference in Sarajevo. The following sixteen interviews, which were conducted in Muenster (2016) and Cardiff (2017), are already available on the YouTube channel of the European Society of Criminology:

• Christopher Birkbeck, interviewed by Gary LaFree;
• Gerben Bruinsma, interviewed by Lieven Pauwels;
• José Luis Díez-Ripollés, interviewed by Anabel Cerezo-Domínguez;
• Frieder Dünkel, interviewed by Ineke Pruin;
• Ineke Haen-Marshall, interviewed by Dirk Enzmann;
• Tim Hope, interviewed by Adam Edwards;
• Susanne Karstedt, interviewed by Alison Liebling;
• Martin Killias, interviewed by Marcelo F. Aebi;
• Krzysztof Krajewski, interviewed by Irena Rzeplinska;
• Friedrich Lösel, interviewed by Caroline Lanskey;
• Dario Melossi, interviewed by Màximo Sozzo;
• David Nelken, interviewed by Stewart Field;
• Paul Ponsaers, interviewed by Antoinette Verhage;
• Sebastián Roché, interviewed by Jenny Fleming;
• Joanna Shapland, interviewed by Matthew Hall;
• Michael Tonry, interviewed by Manuel Eisner.

You can also reach that channel through the ESC Website: http://esc-eurocrim.org/index.php/activities/ecoh. The ECOH project is placed under the responsibility of Rossella Selmini, former president of the ESC.

New Awards

During the General Assembly that took place in Cardiff on 15 September 2017, it was agreed that the ESC Executive Board would consult the members of the Society about a series of new ESC awards. Consequently, during the summer of 2018, each ESC member received an email with a personal link to an online questionnaire with restricted access. One hundred and fifty-eight (158) members participated in the survey and they overwhelmingly accepted the awards and their rules. Consequently, during the General Assembly of the ESC that took place in Sarajevo on 31 August 2018, the members of the Society decided to introduce the following new awards:

• European Journal of Criminology Best Article of the Year Award
• ESC Early Career Award
• Distinguished Services to the ESC Award
• ESC Book Award

The annual European Journal of Criminology Best Article Award recognises the author(s) of the most outstanding article published in the European Journal of Criminology during each calendar year and will be awarded for the first time in 2019.

The ESC Early Career Award recognises the outstanding scientific achievement of an early career European criminologist. The Distinguished Services to the ESC Award recognises outstanding service contributions to the effective functioning of the European Society of Criminology. The ESC Book Award recognises the author(s) of a book that represents an outstanding contribution to the further development of European criminology. These three awards will be introduced from 2020 onwards.

Marcelo F. Aebi is Professor of Criminology at the School of Criminal Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Grace Kronicz is the Secretary of the General Secretariat of the European Society of Criminology