In the early part of my research career, I focused on what is called criminal career research, where you focus on individual offenders to understand whether it is possible to identify high-level offenders. This was tied to the idea of selective incapacitation, a US policy based on the idea that it is possible to predict the career of offenders, the onset of offending, the frequency and level of violence. When I was at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I worked with another young colleague on this for a pragmatic reason: we wanted to get good publications and tenure, and we used innovative grants to get there.
 

The two of us collected lots of criminal justice records and compared them to interviews with offenders. Through a self-report survey of about 2,000 offenders, we developed a life event calendar that allowed us to be specific about what they were doing prior to incarceration. We asked them many questions about the crimes they committed and about the facts recalled. We looked into the local life circumstances: Did they have a job? Were they married? Were they in the military? Were they on probation? We found that it is possible to link the intensity and level of offending over a criminal career to certain local life events. Our policy recommendations did not focus on selective incapacitation but instead on how to influence these life events.

One thing interesting from my current big comparative project is that we have all these countries in the study: Pakistan, Cape Verde, Brazil, US, and Netherlands, and we find that the same variables are related to offending and victimization among young people in all the countries we looked at.  Factors like disorganized neighborhoods, time hanging out in public, low self-control, and physical punishments by parents result in higher violent offending across all countries. Of course, gender is also a variable, and in all countries there is a gender gap. The main thing I have learned about offending and young people is that in all these countries, the causes of these behaviors are comparable. To me, that is an amazing insight. In spite of the fact that data collection is naturally slightly different from place to place, we still get robust results.

I would say definitely to try your luck, including in the United States. There’s a number of ways to look at criminology. You can look at it in terms of practical job prospects, and these are quite good. I think that includes areas of criminology that are fairly new specializations, such as cybercrime, hate crime, and radicalization. The United States is a huge country with a different perspective, and size matters. It has a large number of excellent universities, with a number of spots to do research and lots of positive stuff going on, but at the same time the lack of a social safety net, high inequality, and the easy availability of guns seems to explain the differences between other Western countries.  This makes the US an excellent place to learn more about crime. I would also encourage students to look at organized professional networks, such as the American Society of Criminology and the European Society of Criminology. These networks are easy and open, and open towards helping younger people.

In some way, because of my lived experiences as a criminology scholar with a foot on both continents, I always take a comparative and broader view of the field.  For instance, I’m the founding editor of a journal that just concluded its second year called International Criminology, which is affiliated with the American Society of Criminology. From an American perspective, what we try to do is give a voice to research and policy ideas that go beyond the US experience.  The field of criminology right now, compared to other sciences, is dominated by English language and American scholarship. Generally speaking, criminology as practiced and taught in the US is mostly focused on the US, and is not much invested in international and global issues. This is changing, though, since recent US students are getting more interested in the international perspective. One of my students just finished his doctoral thesis comparing procedural justice in 30 countries.

Once I continued my education in the United States, I couldn’t help but start thinking comparatively, and as a social scientist, context is everything. One thing that’s interesting is that Dutch - and maybe social scientists in Europe in general - are more likely to think comparatively, because there are so many countries with different languages and different cultures on the European continent (compared to the US where there is a shared language, government, and culture). We compare ourselves to the Belgians, the French and the Germans. But in the United States, in a way, they don’t need to look elsewhere, and they remain more inward-looking.  If I’m more critical, I would say what a lot of colleagues in the Netherlands like about mainstream American criminology is that it is data crunching, empirical, and to be honest there is not as much interest in theory development, or concern with human rights as in European criminology. I think that the Dutch criminology has tended to want to be more like American criminology.  It would be unfortunate if that means losing the unique strengths of Dutch criminology.

I think what is important is that students get to speak to someone who has had different experiences from them. Especially for Dutch students - you don’t want to come into the United States and say that everything is better back in the Netherlands. On the other hand, you can’t study criminology without looking at issues like inequality and racism. It would be important for students to realize that these circumstances exist in both countries, not only in the US. Crime is such a highly politicized topic which makes teaching it challenging.  Criminology is all about the root causes about crime, and students can become upset when confronted with the underlying structural causes, including the myth of the American Dream.
 

In addition, something that’s difficult to discuss in the class room in the US is the role of race. It’s the reality that basically, criminal behavior as well as the criminal justice system are shaped by systemic racism, and as a criminologist you know that and you have to talk about it. Race has to be an explicit part of what you teach, but it is a highly controversial and politicized topic which requires careful and emphatic discussion, but fortunately, you can draw from the insights of decades of social science research.  Crime is a negative topic, and discussion of its root causes requires an open mind and willingness to take serious the need to examine our own biases – true for both students as well as the professor.