This book focuses on one part of the judicial system: the criminal justice chain. This involves all the activities and actors dealing with policing, prosecution, judgment, and sanctioning of crimes. In the last decades, reforms have been implemented in several European countries. In Belgium, for example, there was the so-called Octopus reform in 1998. The police was restructured, leading to an integration of the police forces on a national and local level. New steering instruments were introduced, such as regional security plans. With regard to the sanctioning of crimes, a new institution was...

Policing New Risks in Modern European History provides an historical panorama of political and police reactions to the 'risks' of societal change in a Western European perspective, focusing on Belgium, France, The Netherlands and the colonial world, from the late nineteenth-century until the second half of the twentieth-century.

Despite the fact that new perspectives, such as restorative justice, have emerged, the debates have largely focused on issues that bring us back to the inception of juvenile justice: namely whether youth justice ought to be more akin to punitive adult criminal justice, or more sensitive to the welfare of youths.