This paper is part of a special edition on Judicial Rehabilitation, a topic that derived from Maruna's work on rehabilitation and rehabilitation rituals. It addresses the possibility of such rituals in the Netherlands. It describes which data concerning criminal convictions can be stored, how long they may be preserved and which persons and organisations can get access to the criminal records. It also pays attention to the jobs and position for which a conduct certificate is needed and the conditions under which it can be issued. Conclusion of this analysis is that the stricter regulations concerning criminal records, the increase of jobs a conduct certificate is needed for and the stricter conditions under which it is issued, hinder the serious efforts that are made in prison and probation to reduce recidivism.

This paper compares the use of electronic monitoring in three European jurisdictions – Belgium, England and Wales and the Netherlands. It suggests that rates of use, the accepted method of comparison in relation to imprisonment and a proxy measure of ‘punitiveness’ provide a misleading picture when applied to electronic monitoring. This paper transforms Crewe's concept of ‘tightness’ from a dimension of weight to encompass the overlapping elements of length, breadth, depth and weight to provide a framework for analysing how electronic monitoring regimes are designed to disrupt the lives of monitored individuals. Electronic monitoring regimes are diverse and ‘tightness’ varied as much, if not more, within as between jurisdictions. Comparisons of ‘tightness’ also inverted the scale of ‘punitiveness’ produced using rates of use.

Can a prison in the Netherlands, that is neither ‘Dutch’ nor ‘Norwegian’, be ‘legitimate?’ What are the moral challenges? Our study of the controversial Norgerhaven project—a Norwegian prison located in the Netherlands—found that this ‘experiment’ generated one of the most reflexive, ‘deliberative’ prisons we have encountered. Officials involved in the decision assumed that the two jurisdictions were alike in their values. Few were prepared for the differences that arose. This hybrid prison made punishment, the use of authority, and the meanings of fairness, professionalism and discipline unusually explicit as staff negotiated their practices, creating a shift from ‘practical’ to ‘discursive’ consciousness and exposing many of the complexities of liberal penal power.

Between 2005 and 2015 the Dutch prison population decreased by 44 percent. Such a rapid yet sustained reduction in the number of prisoners has no parallel in the Western world in this period. What are the factors that underlie this unique development? This article charts the decline of prisoner numbers in the Netherlands and considers areas that may account for it. It takes a systemic approach which considers publicly available data that has involved the whole of the criminal justice system. It finds that a serious decline in crimes reported to the police is part of the explanation. Although the overall percentage of cases solved by the police has not changed and the prosecution office has not become more reluctant to forward cases to court, fewer cases that warrant imprisonment have come before the court over this period. In addition, the average sentence length imposed by judges has gone down. The proportion of acquittals has gone up. This shows that any explanation should involve developments in policing as well as in the courtroom. However, questions regarding police capacity to deal with serious and organized crime call into question any conclusion that the Dutch carceral collapse is simply due to a decrease in crime. The reality underlying this remarkable reduction in the number of people in prison at any one time in the Netherlands requires a more multifaceted answer than this.