The April edition of the ILS Lunch Seminars with Adriano Martufi and Marco Stam
The monthly ILS Lunch Seminars bring together colleagues and students from Leiden Law School, by providing an informal setting to hear what researchers from other research programs and institutes are working on. On Thursday 19 April the next edition of the ILS Lunch Seminars takes place, featuring presentations from Adriano Martufi and Marco Stam. This time, we will focus on criminal- and criminological issues from an ‘Interaction Between Legal Systems’ point of view.
Adriano Martufi started working at Leiden Law School last February, when he became an Assistant Professor in Criminal Law and Procedure. At the April edition of the ILS Lunch Seminar series, he will introduce himself and his research on “The cross-border dimension of social rehabilitation: interest of the State or right of the individual”. This research project focuses on the European dimension of penalties, which poses major challenges to the traditional understanding of punishment as a state-individual relationship within the national legal order of the EU member states. Martufi will expand in particular on the impact of European inter-state cooperation aiming on ‘social rehabilitation’ by investigating the hybrid nature of this concept under EU law, using a variety of legal sources such as case law from the two European courts and policy documents of the EU.
The second presentation will be given by Marco Stam on “The effects of welfare receipt on crime: A regression discontinuity and instrumental variable approach”. He undertakes this research together with Marike Knoef and Anke Ramakers in a collaboration between the institutes of Economy and Criminology. Widespread theories state that welfare receipts reduce criminal behavior, but estimating the accurate causal effect is challenging due to many unobserved characteristics. In his presentation, Knoef will explain the exogenous variation in Dutch welfare policy when citizens are applying for welfare benefits around the age of 27, implying that potential effects on crime should be considered when shaping welfare policies.
You can find the abstracts of both presentations underneath. This ILS Lunch Seminar will take place on Thursday 19 April 2018, 12:00 – 13:00 hrs (KOG B0.25). Lunch is provided at the monthly seminars and there is no need to register, just join! Please contact Daila Gigengack to sign up as a speaker at an ILS Lunch Seminar or look on our website for more information on ILS 2.0.
Adriano Martufi - “The cross-border dimension of social rehabilitation: interest of the State or right of the individual”
EU judicial cooperation in criminal matters has an increasing impact on the imposition and administration of penalties at national level. Most notably, by increasing extraterritoriality, judicial cooperation poses numerous challenges to the traditional understanding of punishment as a state-individual relationship. The presentation held in the framework of ILS lunch seminars will discuss some findings of an ongoing research project devoted to the European dimension of penalties. The presentation will examine, in particular, the impact of European inter-state cooperation on the aim of ‘social rehabilitation’, by investigating the hybrid nature of this concept under EU law. It is submitted that, in contrast with a traditional view on rehabilitation as a state's interest, a fundamental rights based understanding of this concept is now emerging, which will prove increasingly influential in the future relations between EU law and domestic jurisdictions. The problematic intersections between these two key dimensions of ‘rehabilitation’ (as well as their possible impact on the functioning of EU judicial cooperation) will be critically analyzed drawing on a variety of legal sources: from the case law of the two European courts to the policy documents of the EU.
Marco Stam, Marike Knoef and Anke Ramakers - "The effects of welfare receipt on crime: A regression discontinuity and instrumental variable approach"
Popular theories state that welfare receipt reduces criminal behavior. However, estimating the causal effect of welfare receipt on crime is empirically challenging due to unobserved characteristics influencing both of these outcomes. This paper exploits exogenous variation in Dutch welfare policy around the age of 27. Upon application for welfare benefits, applicants below this age threshold are subject to a four-week period during which they are not eligible for welfare benefits and therefore without discernable legitimate income. Using individual-level administrative data on the entire Dutch population around this age, we estimate an instrumental variable model with a first-stage regression discontinuity design. Results show that welfare receipt reduces the monthly probability of committing crime from 0.50% to 0.27% for men and from 0.14% to 0.04% for women. Among men, we find larger reductions in property crime compared to crime in general, whereas among women the reductions are equally sized. Despite being relatively less affected in their criminal behavior by welfare receipt, we find larger absolute reductions in (property) crime among low-educated men and women. Our findings imply that potential effects on crime should be considered in shaping welfare policy.