It has been found that the better a prisoner is treated, the more effective the sentence. Leiden criminologists therefore research how detention can be improved in such areas as prison life and contact between prisoners and their children.

The Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology conducts extensive research on imprisonment. Sending a person to prison is the most severe form of punishment that can be applied in the criminal justice systems of European countries. In most countries, the number of prisoners has risen in recent decades.…

The Prison Project investigates to what extent imprisonment has consequences for the relapse, health, career and intimate relations of the (ex-)prisoners.

The results of the investigations by citizens are used in an innovative research project that investigates the potential of machine learning and automated detection in archaeology.

This dissertation explores how we can make anomaly detection—identifying unusual or faulty behavior in complex systems—more trustworthy and effective, with a focus on smart manufacturing.

Structural variants (SVs) are the hidden architecture of the human genome, and are critical for us to understand diseases, evolution, and so on.

Single-molecule spectroscopy has become a powerful method for using organic fluorescent molecules in numerous applications.

On 11 October, Amanda Pasma defended the thesis 'Re-entry support from prison-based and community-based professionals'. The doctoral research was supervised by Paul Nieuwbeerta, Hanneke Palmen and Esther van Ginneken.

In the era of big data, extracting insights from complex datasets is a key challenge. This thesis demonstrates the superiority of graph-based methods over traditional clustering (e.g., k-means, DBSCAN) and outlier detection for analyzing high-dimensional and noisy data.

Our group explores the larger domain of quantum measurement. In particular we investigate two themes that are closely connected: The detection of specially prepared quantum states of light and understanding and characterizing quantum photon detectors.

A prisoner from Eindhoven who posted vlogs about his life in prison is attracting thousands of viewers on TikTok and other social media. Esther van Ginneken commented on regional news site ‘Omroep Brabant’: 'Contact is a human necessity.'

Promotor: E.R. Eliel, Co-Promotor: M.J.A. de Dood

Compared to other countries, Dutch prisons have relatively few inmates. But who are behind bars in our prisons? Professor of Criminology and Comparative Penology Miranda Boone: ‘It's not the bad, but often the sad and the mad.’

Promotor: Prof. dr. I. Snellen, Co-Promotor: Dr. M. Kenworthy

Promotor: E. Bouwman Co-Promotor: S. Bonnet

On the 10th of November, Martin Kroon successfully defended a doctoral thesis. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Martin on this achievement!

Miles Kellerman, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, argues in a new article that governments should consider empowering financial crime bounty hunters by creating Licensed Detection Agents to address structural failures in current systems for detecting financial crime.

On 8 January 2020, Jelmer Brouwer defended his thesis 'Detection, detention, deportation'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.P. van der Leun and Prof. M.A.H. van der Woude.

Detecting nanoscopic objects plays an important role in nanoscience in particular, in the rapidly growing field of nanobiology. The forebear to modern super-resolution microscopy for single molecule investigation, is fluorescence microscopy.

In this thesis, we describe the latest advances in SQUID-detected Magnetic Resonance Force Microscopy (MRFM).

In this project we develop algorithms to automatically detect a particular type of archaeological sites in satellite images of the Alps.

Prison staff are working under high pressure. The current proposal for cell sharing is the final straw. Associate Professor Esther van Ginneken appeared on Dutch news programme ‘Nieuwsuur’: ‘Serious incidents have occurred, including the murder of a cellmate.’

This thesis describes the Multi-site All-Sky CAmeRA (MASCARA), which consists of two small robotic telescope designed to detect exoplanets around the brightest stars in the sky.

Deepfakes are videos that have been manipulated to replace one person’s likeness with that of another. They can be difficult to distinguish from authentic videos. In our study, we found that people who score high on conspiracy thinking and people who use social media more are better at distinguishing…

Generally the data from remote sensing surveys - the scanning of the earth by satellite or aircraft in order to obtain information about it - is screened manually in archaeology. However, constant monitoring of the earth's surface causes a huge influx of data of high complexity and high quality. To…

So far it has been impossible to compare large sets of syntactic constructions in large sets of languages systematically and automatically. The online availability of parallel text corpora and software tools to align, enrich, search and analyse them has the potential to make automatic massive systematic…

Ten years ago, a new reward system was introduced in Dutch prisons: the only way prisoners could earn extra ‘freedoms’ was through good behaviour. Jan Maarten Elbers concludes that this system does little to encourage behavioural change and can even be counterproductive.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading global cause of mortality. Endothelial dysfunction, an early reversible stage of CVD development, is marked by decreased nitric oxide production linked to Ca2+ influx in endothelial cells.

Homicide engenders broad moral concerns in society, and its aftermath can be understood as a barometer for criminal justice policy. Of all homicides committed, however, only some lead to arrest, to prosecution and ultimately to conviction in court.

Hilde Wermink, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminal Law & Criminology was interviewed on this topic for an article published in US News on 13 May.

The major and ultimate aim of metabolomics is to obtain an answer to a specific biological or clinical question.

PhD defence

The Life in Custody (LIC) Study comprises a large-scale research project into prison climate and the quality of prison life in Dutch prisons.

The manual analysis of remotely-sensed data is a widespread practice in local and regional scale archaeological research, as well as heritage management.

Source: Biosens Bioelectron, Volume 74, pp. 233-42 (2015)

Ariane Briegel wants to use bacteria to detect cancer at an early stage. Together with postdoc Alise Muok, she is developing a method to quickly and cheaply test the urine of patients for the presence of suspicious molecules. They receive a grant of approximately 150,000 euros from the Dutch Cancer…

Four men have been sentenced to 25 years in jail for murdering a female relative. Jeroen ten Voorde, Professor of Criminal and Criminal Procedural Law, spoke to ‘Trouw’ newspaper about the court ruling: ‘They're all considered perpetrators under criminal law.’

Leiden and Jülich researchers discovered an elegant and simple approach to improve the sensitivity of graphene biosensors. These so-called ‘next generation graphene electronic biochemical sensor devices’ are able to detect very low amounts of HIV DNA thanks to their very low electronic noise.

Radical books on Islam glorifying armed jihad and humiliating Jews and Christians are available in the Vught prison library.

Researchers at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology - Paul Nieuwbeerta, Anouk Bosma, Esther van Ginneken, Hanneke Palmen and Maria Berghuis - have received 800,000 euro from the Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency (DJI) of the Ministry of Security and Justice to investigate living conditions…