Assessing a moral panic relating to crime and drugs policy in the Netherlands: Towards a testable theory

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 31-47

  Baerveldt, Chris ^a   Bunkers, Hans ^a   De Winter, Micha ^a   Kooistra, Jan ^a  

^a UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

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EID: 22444453715     PISSN: 09254994     EISSN: 15730751     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008208420712     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Boendermaker, L. & Verwers, C. (1996). Een veld in beeld. Een beschrijving van het werk in justitiële behandelinrichtingen. Arnhem: Gouda Quint.
2. Baerveldt, C. & Luijpers, E. (1997). Meer cellen door meer jeugdcriminaliteit? Een beschouwing van enkele trends. In Baerveldt, C. & Bunkers, H. (eds) (1997). Jeugd en Cel in Nederland. Over justitiële inrichtingen, jongeren en jongvolwassenen. Utrecht: De Tijdstroom, 19-32.
3. Commission juvenile delinquency (1994). Aanpak jeugdcriminaliteit. Met de neus op de feiten. The Hague: SDU.
4. For an interesting recent view we refer to Simon, J. (1995) They died with their boots on: the boot camp prison and the limits of modern penality. Social Justice 22, 2, 25-48.
5. He sees boot camp prisons in the US both as an ultimate expression of penal modernity and, because of their highly symbolic appeal (to nostalgia), as a sign of the decay of penal modernity's plausibility. See for a review Beenakkers, E.M.Th. (1993). Amerikaanse kampementen. Een literatuurverkenning naar "boot camp prisons" in de Verenigde Staten. The Hague, Ministry of Justice.
6. Cohen, S. (1980). Folk devils and moral panics. The creation of Mods and Rockers. New York: St. Martin's Press. (First published in 1972).
7. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis. Mugging, the state, and law and order. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.
8. Waddington's (1986) contention rests upon a re-analysis of the empirical material offered by Hall et al. Without a criterion of proportionality the term moral panic has inherently negative connotations. The decrease of crime Hall et al. refer to is in fact, according to Waddington, a decreasing increase: crime rates are growing at a slower speed (so-called compounds effects: pp. 248-252). Using London crime figures from another source, Waddington shows that at the time reported robbery increased faster than crime in general, and mugging grew more rapidly than robbery (253). He concludes that "we should abandon such value-laden terminology" (258), i.e. the concept of "moral panics". Waddington, A.J. (1986). Mugging as a moral panic: a question of proportion. British Journal of Sociology; 37(2): 254-259.
9. Goode, E. & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: the social construction of deviance. Cambridge (USA): Blackwell Publishers.
10. Goode & Ben-Yehuda (1994) 30. See note 8 for reference.
11. Elias, N. & Scotson, J.L. (1965). The established and the outsiders. A sociological enquiry into community problems. London, Cass. Dutch translation, 1985 (1976).