Until approximately 1995, the Netherlands had a very low prison rate compared to the surrounding countries. David Downes, who made a comparison between the Dutch and the British penal policy, choose as a title for his book: Contrasts in Tolerance. He attributed the differences between England & Wales and the Netherlands, partly to the tolerant culture in the Netherlands compared to England & Wales (Downes, 1985: 69 e.v.). What exactly did he mean by tolerance in this context and in how far can this characteristic of Dutch penal policy explain the recent downfall of the Dutch prison population.

This column reacts to the use of the word ‘Djuka’ (spelled variously) for the Suriname Maroons. This word, although derived from the perfectly respectable tribal name of Ndyuka, is widely considered today as a term of abuse and interpreted to mean ‘shit of the Jews’. It has therefore become unusable in serious literature.

The author discusses the proposals done by Richard Korver, a Dutch victim-solicitor, with regard to the legal position of the victim in the Dutch penal procedure. They amount to making the victim a fully equipped party to the procedure with – as it were – the same arms as the offender and his solicitor has. These proposals include an autonomous right to appeal against the verdict in first instance, a right to make a victim statement of opinion, the right to rebuke the bench, and the right to be heard in almost every procedural and substantial decision of any authority in the penal process and in the execution of punishment. The authors comment is that these proposals, when realized, will imply an intensification of the polarized legal debate in the penal procedure, with more risks of secondary victimization. The problem is not that the defendant will oppose two prosecutors, but that the victim will find the public prosecutor not on his side when the latter does his job as he should: serving the interests of justice. The inquisitorial procedure does allow for participation of victims, but only in so far as this participation can serve the interests of establishing the truth of the matter and determining proportionate and equal punishment. Meanwhile the risk of instrumentalising the victim and his needs in interests in punitive strategies exists. Restorative practices offer a much better context for an assertive victim to defend his interests and satisfy his needs, staying out of a debate in which the measure of punishment functions as the yardstick of his suffering. Regular civil law procedures could be the second option and criminal procedures should be relegated again to their rightful place as ultima ratio.

Against the background of a discussion of classical and modern concepts of punishment, the first implying the imposition of suffering as essence and the second encompassing all varieties of sanctions implying restrictions but not necessarily some form of suffering the author rejects the suggestion of the second concept, that punishment should be defined without any reference to imposing suffering. There are conceptual advantages to sticking to the classical definition of punishment, such as the fact that it is clearly differentiated from the concept of measurements, which are sanctions imposed without any demand of ‘guilt’ on the side of a perpetrator. Also there are good reasons to maintain the element of (imposition of ) ‘intended pain’ in the concept of punishment, but it is this element – the intentional imposition of pain and suffering – that makes the author reject the activity of punishing as unethical. Non-violent sanctions are conceivable and feasible and should on ethical grounds be preferred. This is explored with reference to the work of Tähtinen. In close connection with this idea the author argues that we should redefine criminal justice (in the Dutch language: ‘strafrecht’ meaning the right to punish and laws regarding punishment) to mean that it is the discipline that responds to crimes and offences, without any defining reference to punishment (‘misdaadrecht’, meaning the laws regarding ((responding to)) crime).

In 2011 it was revealed that the Dutch social-psychologist Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University faked his experiments and fabricated findings.Many of his PhD-students relied upon his statistical data and, as a result, their dissertations and publications have been qualified as fraudulent. Here I wilI focus mainly on gaining access to the PhD-students. I show that trust and distrust played an essential part in the communication with these respondents. Some of them state that the framing of Stapel as the evil mastermind is not coherent with their experience. They also define him as an enthusiastic and brilliant supervisor who was interested in their work.

The intensification of scientific competition and the availability of scientific knowledge on the internet seem to be rendering the notion of intellectual property obsolete. Conventional citation- and referencing practices through which intellectual debt is acknowledged are increasingly being ignored or undermined. In this essay, it is argued that these conventional citation- and referencing practices represent valuable norms of scientific conduct and, therefore, are vital to the scientific ethos of free and independent scientific research. For this reason, editors and reviewers need to accept their responsibility for educating the next generation of scholars to respect conventions for acknowledging intellectual debt.

In this article the authors debate the subject fire alarm system.

In this article the author debates the subject fire alarm system.