Blog
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The economic impact of crime prevention and rehabilitation of prison inmates
Public expenditure on crime prevention and rehabilitation programmes are typically only considered a cost to the public budgets in Denmark. Expenditure on such programmes can however also be considered an investment, if the programmes have beneficial effects that can be documented through scientific impact evaluations. Cost-benefit-models aim to show whether the beneficial effects of programmes…
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Looking Back on the Nordic Criminology Blog 2021
What a year it has been! Earlier in 2021, we launched the Nordic Criminology Blog as a joint initiative of the Nordic Journal of Criminology (NJC) and the Nordic Research Council for Criminology (NSfK). We have published 19 blogposts from scholars engaging with criminology from a Nordic perspective. The Blog has been used to publish…
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Nordic Noir – a criminological critique
In this short blogpost, Professors Keith Hayward (Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Steve Hall (formerly of the University of Northumbria and the University of Teesside, UK)contextualise and reflect on their 2020 article ‘Through Scandinavia, darkly: a criminological critique of Nordic Noir’, which appeared in Volume 61 of the British Journal of Criminology.…
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Criminology in the time of populism
By Jerzy Sarnecki, Senior professor of criminology Throughout my more than 45-year research career, I have strived for a simple (one might say positivistic) logic when it comes to the relationship between research and politics. We researchers provide politicians with facts. Based on this and other knowledge, politicians make the necessary decisions. In the vulgar attacks on…
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Drug policy in Iceland: A paradigm shift in sight?
By Helgi Gunnlaugsson, Professor of Sociology, University of Iceland I always enjoy participating in the annual European criminology conference. This year only held online. A pity not being able to socialize on site with the colleagues yet easy to wander between different sessions. This year I gave a talk in a working group on European drug…
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The public sense of justice in Scandinavia: A reply to a misinformed critique
Leif Petter Olaussen criticizes the Scandinavian study of the general sense of justice, published in European Journal of Criminology (Olaussen 2021). He did so already ten years ago in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab (Olaussen 2011 a, b). We answered the critique in the same issue (Balvig et al. 2011) and also in European Journal of…
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Evaluating the Danish Youth Crime Board
By Tine Fuglsang and Signe Bechmann Hansen In 2018, the Danish Parliament passed a political reform addressing serious youth crime. As part of the reform, the Youth Crime Board (Ungdomskriminalitetsnævnet) was established in 2019. The objective of the Youth Crime Board is to prevent youth crime, by appointing targeted individual preventive actions for young individuals…
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‘Since that day, I only felt hate for the police’ – Narratives of police violence and insults
”The police is here to protect the society. But they don’t protect you. They protect the society against you. That’s the feeling you have.” (Man, 19 years) Narratives and rumors of police violence circulate among ethnic minority men in some socially deprived neighborhoods in Denmark. They tell and retell stories of being treated more harshly…
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Blog on summer break
This Blog is inactive during the summer (Midsummer-August 2021). We will be back with fresh posts in September. Thank you all for contributing and reading! We wish you a really nice and relaxing summer, NSfK & NJC Photo: Aleksandr Eremin, Unsplash
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In memory of professor Thomas Mathiesen (1933-2021)
Thomas Mathiesen (1933-2021) Getting an overview of and taking in the career of Thomas Mathiesen is a daunting experience for any scholar and any citizen with a basic sense of civic responsibility. He studied sociology at the University of Wisconsin 1953-55, defended his famous doctoral thesis The Defences of the Weak at the University of…