Immigration and Alternative Forms of Justice

• In Event: Balkan Criminology: Punishment and Prisons and their Alternatives

Abstract

The growing ethnical diversification of a state’s population throughout Europe, esp. in Germany, has been going on for decades and in that sense is nothing fundamentally new. It is however interesting that there is only limited research and thus scarce knowledge to be found on how and why different ethnical minorities frequently resort to informal (self)justice, rather than to utilize the mechanisms of their host state’s criminal justice system. Thus, seemingly such informal crime control apparently has its advantages and apparently also works quite well. How come? The presentation provides for empirical findings and a first analysis on what we know thus far about such informal crime control, in order to detect whether there might be certain insights and mechanisms from which we can learn and that could find their way into the official criminal justice.

Author

• Hans-Jörg Albrecht, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law; Balkan Criminology