I entered the field of criminology in 1980 as a master's student in social psychology. My main subject was juvenile crime and rehabilitation. I studied criminological literature and did an internship in a prison reform centre for young men. It struck me there that nobody talked about the crimes they had committed, why these were wrong and what their own responsibility was. The atmosphere was in some sense morally neutral or, to put it another way, ‘not moral’. It was as if doing their time there was a given, and didn't have any serious normative reason. It was in those years that the idea of ‘postmodernism’ found some resonance generally.

Social arrangements were relatively solid until the 1960s, but by the 1980s they were no more. Traditional norms and values – of the church, family life and school – were heavily disrupted, and in Western societies, the crime problem was rising. In the penal system, there was still a lot of attention on social deprivation and psychological neglect. Punishment was on a penal-welfare basis, as David Garland would later write in his book The culture of control (2001). Crime was treated as an error or a mistake of a rather consensual society. The changes in society seemed to result in a kind of moral embarrassment in the prison centre. There was some uneasiness as to norms and values.

My internship was the start of a career dedicated to ‘moral order’. Why is it that we reject crime, if there are no self-evident norms and values any more? Was the increase in crime related to the process of secularization? Are there any new moral mechanisms in educating children and maintaining public order? How about issues of violent radicalism or sexual harassment? There are actually no issues without a moral angle – these are eternal issues in ever-changing forms and appearances. As the British criminologist Anthony Bottoms (2002; cited by Millie, 2016) has written: ‘if they are true to their calling, all criminologists have to be interested in morality’.

A lot has happened over the years. Due to the processes of globalization, digitalization and individualization, the social structure of society has completely changed. In half a century, the Western world has evolved into highly consumerist network societies with diverse multi-ethnic populations (at least in certain parts of the big cities).