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.’

Inside-Out Prison Exchange is a course in which students and prisoners work together on research questions in the area of crime, law enforcement and major social issues. The course takes place at a unique location: within the walls of a prison.

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.’

Leiden Law Cast is a podcast made by Leiden Law School, Leiden University, for everyone who wants to learn more about current legal issues.

Adults are more likely to reoffend after a short prison sentence than comparable adults with a non-custodial sentence, Leiden University research shows. This is true for the likelihood and extent of repeat crime.

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.

Prisoners who are visited regularly by family or friends are less likely to be reconvicted in the short term than inmates who rarely or never receive visits. Visits should therefore be encouraged and facilitated, according to PhD candidate Maria Berghuis, who will defend her doctoral thesis on 23 June…

Cuts in the prison system threaten to be at the expense of security, including that of society, writes university lecturer Esther van Ginneken in an opinion piece in Dutch newspaper NRC.

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…

Dutch political parties have presented their own 'solutions' to make society 'safer'. How do the party positions compare with scientific research on crime reduction?

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…

One perspective, one cell, one outlook on life: what are we all prisoners of? That’s the question Vrij Nederland put to various experts, including Joni Reef, Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the Department of Criminology.

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…

Helping industry to spot dangerous and climate-harming gas leaks faster, cheaper, and more reliably than today’s tools: that's what Leiden University and BigCircle Ventures set out do in a new spin-off company.

Prisoners who have little or no contact with the outside world are more prone to reoffend. What makes visits so important?

Why do violent incidents occur in prisons? And how do staff respond? Assistant Professor Esther van Ginneken will use a grant from the NWO Vidi Talent Programme to conduct research into these and other questions. She intends to make use of virtual reality.

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.

Prisoners deserve better professional support when preparing to return to society. PhD candidate Amanda Pasma: ‘You can’t imprison everyone for life. Society will have to give prisoners a second chance.’

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.

If you end up in prison somewhere in the world, the chances are you won’t be allowed to vote. If it were up to researchers Tom Theuns and Andrei Poama, rather than disenfranchise felons, we would oblige them to vote. That would be a better way to express democratic values.

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

PhD defence