Sentencing research focusing solely on unsuspended imprisonment does no justice to the practice of sentencing, where many other punishment types are imposed – often conjunctly. To investigate to what extent this imprisonment bias might have caused incomplete and thereby biased findings, we compare the effects of offender characteristics for imprisonment to those for other sanction types, as well as to a model combining sanction types. Findings suggest that the effects of offender characteristics differ per sanction type. When combinations of sanction types are taken into account, some offender characteristics do no longer have mitigating or aggravating effects, or the effects even inverted. Hence, future sentencing research should aim to include all sentences imposed.

How do organisations collaborate in the daily practice of law enforcement? And what role plays autonomy of government agencies within this cooperation? In this article the authors answer these questions on the base of two case studies: two large scale projects in which a partnership approach was used to combat human trafficking in the Netherlands. Collaboration between city administration, investigation services and tax authorities seems to be very hard to put into practice. This is understandable from the theory that government agencies, while performing their tasks, are focused on achieving autonomy.

Using summated scale scores to make group comparisons is only meaningful if one can assume that the scale measures attribute in the same way in each of the groups involved in the comparison. This assumption is called measurement invariance. This contribution discusses the use of modern statistical measurement models to test this assumption and to verify the consequences of a possible violation for the comparison of group means. In the empirical part of the contribution the authors illustrate their account by examining whether a scale assessing avoidance behavior – commonly used in fear of crime research – is invariant across gender and age groups.

Both in punishment theory and sentencing practices, the subjective sentence severity is an important yet neglected area of research. This paper aims to explain differences between inmates in their subjective severity of imprisonment and to contemplate these against the background of important sentencing goals and sentencing principles. Two models commonly used to explain adjustment to prison life were applied: the import and deprivation model. Data from the Prison Project, collected among Dutch inmates staying in pretrial detention, reveal that both import and deprivation characteristics are related to the subjective severity of imprisonment. No support is found for a moderation effect of personality.