For nearly 50 years after World War II, the Netherlands was commonly portrayed as having the most liberal and humane criminal justice system among Western countries (e.g., Downes, 1988); however, in the early 21st century, some researchers view it as having one of Europe's most severe criminal justice systems. Dutch police, prosecutors, and judges have wide discretionary powers. During the closing decades of the 20th century, the powers of the police and the prosecution grew substantially. Their authority to dispose of cases without referring them to the courts expanded significantly. The judiciary has wide discretionary powers in sentencing. Legislation establishes maximum sentences for particular crimes, and there are no minimums. The imprisonment rate has grown steeply and continuously for three decades from being the lowest in Western Europe to being one of the highest. This increase occurred without enactment of significantly harsher sentencing laws and without crime control becoming a dominant partisan political issue. From official police records, it appears that both property and violent crime increased in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s, and property crime rates began to decline in the 1990s. Although it is more difficult to generalize about recent trends in violence, the stabilization of homicide rates in the early 1990s and the subsequent slight decline suggest that the true incidence of violence in society has not been increasing for more than a decade. According to victimization surveys, property-crime rates have declined, and violent crime rates have stabilized. Dutch criminology has been strong in a number of subjects, notably with regard to organizational and white-collar crime, organized crime, juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and immigration-related crime. 3 tables, 6 figures, and 54 references