Chrisje Brants

The Fine Art of Regulated Tolerance: Prostitution in Amsterdam

I explore the idiosyncrasies of Dutch policy with regard to prostitution, placing them in the broader framework of criminal justice and policy debates in general. More especially, I shall be looking at recent developments towards, on the one hand, legalization of prostitution, and on the other a crackdown by the (criminal justice) authorities on the organized criminal networks that would appear to have gained the upper hand in Amsterdam`s red-light district.

Gold-Collar Crime

Such statements now seem commonplace to the student of white-collar and corporate crime, yet these were penned not long after Edwin Sutherland defined white-collar crime as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation,”3 and long before the term “corporate crime” became normal usage in criminology. Written in 1944 and 1947, respectively, they refer to the difficulties of understanding and judging the international crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II—acts we now know as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, although then the terminology was slightly different. For the purpose of this article, I shall use the term “international crimes” as synonymous with the three categories in current use.

Turmoil and transition ‐ problems of criminal law enforcement in the Netherlands

During the 1990s, lack of control and monitoring of covert police activities in the Netherlands led to a crisis in the overall legitimacy of criminal process and crime control ‐a ‘crisis in the Rechtstaat’. This in its turn led to new legislation that extended police powers and attempted restore hierarchical and judicial control of the police force by the prosecution service and the courts. However, although covert policing was the direct reason for the crisis, the deep‐seated causes go much further back. This paper examines the changes in the definition of crime as a social and political problem and related expectations of policing and its practice over the years. It seeks to explain why the recent crisis in the Netherlands took the form that it did and why attempts to solve it through yet more legislation are by no means certain to succeed.