Together with Georg Wenzelburger from Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Sarah Berens receives funding from the conference program of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation to organize the international workshop “Societies under Stress: Investigating the relationship between welfare and penal policies in an era of rising insecurities” at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in fall 2018. The conference will be supported with 10,000€ by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. In collaboration with Sarah Brooks (OSU), who will host the conference at OSU, Marianne Ulriksen (University of Southern Denmark) and Peter Starke (University of Southern Denmark) as organizing team, the workshop aims at advancing collaborative research on the relationship between social welfare and penal policies across nations. Crime control and social welfare are the ‘left hand and right hand of the state,’ and yet these instruments of social control are usually examined in isolation. The workshop brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to ask: What are the causal links between crime control and social welfare policies? Taking a global perspective, the workshop will address this topic with contributions from different regional contexts such as Latin America, Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States.