Criminology and Democratic Politics

Tom Daems is Professor of Criminology at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Belgium. Stefaan Pleysier is Professor of Criminology at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Belgium.

1. Introduction 2. A conversation with Richard Sparks 3. Authoritarian under-labouring? 4. Criminology’s plausible worlds: Ideologies, crime control, and the practice of democratic under-labouring 5. Public and southern criminologies: A possible encounter 6. Desistance research and penal policy 7. Understanding comparative penality: Some continuing conceptual and analytical challenges 8. Punishment and epistemological politics in Europe 9.Outrage marketing and deceptive campaigning: Populist and epistocratic pathologies of an anti-political era 10. Epistemic public criminology: The fallacies of evidence-based policing 11. Public perceptions of the seriousness of crime: A valid indicator of actual crime seriousness? 12. Dark sides and black holes: A study of criminological research utilization in two sex offender policies 13. Reflections on knowledge exchange and democratic under-labouring: Encounters, brokering, and the collective impact of engagement 14. Different worlds: Police, police research, and policy in Belgium 15. 90 years of criminology at the KU Leuven: Political, theoretical, and institutional considerations 16. What are we going to do now? Criminology and democratic politics all over again