Trends in Crime Rates, Certainty of Punishment and Severity of Punishment in the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper addresses the interaction between crime rates and sentencing policies in the Netherlands, a country generally known for its relatively lenient treatment of criminals. The first section describes major changes which have taken place in Dutch crime policy and criminality over the last twenty years. The second part of the paper speculates about the interplay between, respectively, certainty and severity of punishment and crime rates in the Netherlands. The major source for the description of developments in Dutch crime and crime policy is the recently published government policy document Sameleving en Criminaliteit: Een Beleidsplan voor de Komende Jaren (1985), supplemented by other government reports, criminal justice statistics, and scholarly publications. In this study, no attempt is made to address the profound problems and criticisms that arise from the use of aggregated data to study general deterrence. We lack, at this point, the necessary data to provide sophisticated time-series analyses appropriate for such an endeavor. Rather, our efforts are directed at providing a general description of some of the more important changes which have taken place in Dutch criminal justice policy and crime, with some speculative comments about possible implications for deterrence theory.