A very large number of people experience everyday legal problems considered by them to be serious and difficult to resolve, the vast majority say it is important to resolve these problems, and virtually everybody experiencing legal problems takes some action to resolve them. However, the fact that very few people make use of the formal justice system suggests that the justice system is not meeting the legal needs of the public. One response would be to expand the traditional formal justice system to include an early-resolution services sector. An ERSS would encompass the early intervention and supported self-help objectives of many existing access to justice initiatives, but would go farther by conceiving what we mean by the justice system more broadly in a way that would accommodate what the everyday legal problems approach tells us about how the public experiences legal problems.

In this interview, Lode Walgrave talks to John Braithwaite, one of the most cited white collar crime scholars and best known for his ‘reintegrative shaming’, which added the crucial moral-emotional and ethical dimensions to the body of work on crime and crime control. John Braithwaite tells about his major publications and developments in his intellectual endeavour: the role of shaming and its importance in restorative justice, dominion, responsive regulation, and also his recent project on peacebuilding. Braithwaite’s career and political involvement are discussed throughout the interview, as well as his critical view with regards to the fragmentation of social sciences (including criminology).

De auteurs hebben in navolging van de Parlementaire Enquêtecommissie Woningcorporaties een nadere analyse gemaakt van fraude en corruptie bij woningcorporaties. Zij hebben zes fraudezaken onder de loep genomen die door de commissie nog niet waren onderzocht. Hun bevindingen bevestigen die van de Enquêtecommissie: bestuurders van frauderende corporaties zagen geen integriteitsproblemen, en werden niet gehinderd door enige vorm van intern toezicht.

In this article I focus on the academic environment in which social psychologist Diederik Stapel worked and developed his career as a con academic. He published over 50 articles with fabricated data in top tier journals. This article is based on interviews with Stapel himself and document analysis. Especially, I pay attention to his socialization as an academic in his years at the University of Amsterdam, where he did his PhD (1986-2000). In my description of how social psychology developed in the nineties in Amsterdam it becomes clear that there was a strong emphasis on competition and publishing articles in top tier journals. Stapel conformed to this culture of competition and published almost as much as the two leading full professors of his department during the period 1995-2000. In the early nineties Stapel discovered that the use of questionable research procedures (QRPs) was common in social psychology. He realized that without using these procedures it was hardly possible to get good results and publish frequently in top tier journals. Though Stapel resented this partly and was disenchanted by this experience, he did integrate QRPs in his daily academic practice. He actually raised the issue of QRPs in a lecture in Oxford when he received the Jos Jaspars Early Career Award of the EAESP, but there was hardly any substantive response to his presentation. The academic culture in which Stapel developed his career can be described as ‘indifferent tolerant’. Though Stapel does refer to the circumstances which influenced his academic fraud, he does state that he himself is responsible for his massive scientific misconduct.

Scientific misconduct takes place at the heart of higher education organizations. Organizational culture (meso level) shapes scholars’ behaviors and perceptions (micro level) about what should be problematized while conducting research and teaching. In this paper it is argued that there are organizational mechanisms at place by which organizational goals (funding) and professional goals (recognition) become indistinguishable. The mechanisms are: pressure, loose social control, scarce resources and lack of alternatives. Scholars may strategically react to these mechanisms by accepting, fitting in, resisting or giving up. It is at the heart of these mechanisms and strategies that problematic behaviors may emerge.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in scientific malpractice. In the Netherlands, for example, several major cases of plagiarism, fabrication of data and falsification of findings have come to light. The scandal surrounding the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who simply made up the results of empirical research, prompted worldwide attention. As a result of these scandals, universities have, in the past few years, increased their efforts to better ensure the integrity of scientific research. In this process it is sometimes overlooked that scientific integrity is not a clear-cut concept. By examining three ethical issues relevant to criminological research, this article aims to illustrate that the assessment of integrity is a complicated matter. The first dilemma relates to maintaining confidentiality: how to ensure that the privacy of respondents is protected and the research will not harm their interests? The second dilemma has to do with the degree of openness and transparency required from the viewpoint of scientific accountability. How transparent can one be when it comes to conducting scientific research based on secret information and closed sources that are only accessible to the researchers? Finally, the third dilemma concerns the independent position of criminological research. What are the possibilities and limitations of free and independent research in the field of criminology?