In this article, the author will question the seemingly obvious boundary between civil disobedience, as conceptualised by Rawls and Arendt, and several examples of criminal, or simply annoying, activities which don't meet their criteria, such as the case of the ‘Top 50'. The ‘Top 50' are multi-problem Dutch-Caribbean men, who refuse to adapt to predominant norms in Dutch society. IThe author argues that political aspects of their behaviour should be acknowledged, even if they engage in criminal behaviour and don't present explicit political goals. Firstly, she questions the way in which Rawls based his definition on a centralistic conception of governmental power and contrast it with Foucault's conception of normalising power, in which power is diffuse and cannot be restricted to the enactment of formal laws. Secondly, she discusses what the minimum requirements are to be able to classifyacts as civil disobedience. Rawls and Arendt draw a clear line between criminal behaviour and civil disobedience, but their requirements may be too strict. We might miss signals of injustice if actions that do not meet these criteria are excluded from the political discourse. The conclusion is that comparing Arendt's and Rawls' conception of civil disobedience with the behaviour of a marginal migrant group may be useful in questioning the boundaries of this concept and in making it more inclusive. A wider conception of civil disobedience may help to explain the meaning of deviant behaviour in terms of social critique and to challenge the traditional understanding of civil disobedience.
The past two decades, a disproportionate growth of females entering the criminal justice system and forensic mental health services has been observed worldwide. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the background of women who are convicted for violent offenses. What is their criminal history, what are their motives for offending and in which way do they differ from men convicted for violent offenses? In this study, criminal histories and the offenses for which they were admitted to forensic care were analyzed of 218 women and 218 men who have been treated between 1984 and 2014 with a mandatory treatment order in one of four Dutch forensic psychiatric settings admitting both men and women. It is concluded that there are important differences in violent offending between male and female patients. Most importantly, female violence was more often directed towards their close environment, like their children, and driven by relational frustration. Furthermore, female patients received lower punishments compared to male patients and were more often considered to be diminished accountable for their offenses due to a mental illness.
MULTIFILE
Forensic reports use various types of conclusions, such as a categorical (CAT) conclusion or a likelihood ratio (LR). In order to correctly assess the evidence, users of forensic reports need to understand the conclusion and its evidential strength. The aim of this paper is to study the interpretation of the evidential strength of forensic conclusions by criminal justice professionals. In an online questionnaire 269 professionals assessed 768 reports on fingerprint examination and answered questions that measured self-proclaimed and actual understanding of the reports and conclusions. The reports entailed CAT, verbal LR and numerical LR conclusions with low or high evidential strength and were assessed by crime scene investigators, police detectives, public prosecutors, criminal lawyers, and judges. The results show that about a quarter of all questions measuring actual understanding of the reports were answered incorrectly. The CAT conclusion was best understood for the weak conclusions, the three strong conclusions were all assessed similarly. The weak CAT conclusion correctly emphasizes the uncertainty of any conclusion type used. However, most participants underestimated the strength of this weak CAT conclusion compared to the other weak conclusion types. Looking at the self-proclaimed understanding of all professionals, they in general overestimated their actual understanding of all conclusion types.
