The conference was called for the purpose of discussing issues and priorities for international cooperation in criminological studies in developed and industrialized nations and to arrive at some consensus concerning basic issues and priorities within areas of study that would lend themselves to comparative and cooperative research in different countries. An explicit goal of the conference was to arrive at a tentative agenda of high priority research subject areas, which would lend themselves readily to comparative study, depending on the state of development of research capabilities and which reflect the research interests of the different participating countries. The ultimate goal of the conference will be to produce an essay, constituting a written outline for the field of comparative criminology and comparative research, which will be made available to the field at large.

In a recent historical study of crime and conflict in London, Stockholm, an Sydney we found remarkable parallels in their experience of common crime. The incidence of offenses against persons and property, as registered in police reports and court records, declined by an average ratio of 8 to 1 between the 1830's and the 1930's. Since then, and especially since the 1950's, rates of common crime have turned sharply upward. The evidence seemed to rule out several plausible explanations of this reversing trend. First, we found no evidence that the trends were due to changes in the criminal law or police detection and reporting practices. Common crime did not become simply less visible through out the 19th century and then more visible in the mid-20th century. Nor could the reversal be attributed to the changing effectiveness of the law, police, and courts. The institutions and policies which evolved during a century of improving public order were much the same during the “crime wave” of the 1960's as they were during the orderly decades between the two world wars. We concluded that the reversing trend signified real and substantial changes in the magnitude of threatening social behavior — changes that were common to all three societies.

The relationship between crime and culture has not been neglected. It has intrigued criminologists for years. As deviance or abnormal behaviour it has an even longer history in sociology and psychology (cf. Wirth : 1931). Though the seminal thinking can be ascribed to sources as diverse as Durkheim, Ferri, Savigny, Duguit, Marx and even Montesquieu, it is Thorsten Sellin (1938) who is generally credited with pionneering the cultural conflict approach in criminology. It is certainly Sellin who encouraged studies of the relationship between cultural norms and crime when inter alia he compared the older social imperatives of the different migrant groups in America with the requirements of the modern law. He was able to demonstrate that acts forbidden by law might well be enjoined by the culture or by the social system to which the migrants belonged.

For a number of historical reasons research on the causes of crime has tended to be unfortunately insular and even ethnocentric. For example, almost all systematic research on the social, economic, and cultural origins of homicide has been done with respect to the experiences of single societies (18). While these investigations of an individual society are of great descriptive value, they do not by themselves result in general explanations and theories. In addition, researchers interested in homicide rates have lavished repeated attention on the data of a handful of nations — e.g., the U.S. and Great Britain — and neglected the inspection of a heterogeneous range of societies.

Une conception très large de la violence est depuis quelque temps fort en vogue. Les expressions « violence juvénile et estudiantine», «violence dans les rues», «violence institutionnalisée» font actuellement partie du vocabulaire de nombreux criminologues qui refusent de limiter leurs réflexions à l’étude des délits à contenu violent. Pour certains, la violence recouvre une réalité polymorphe, ce qui rend primordial l'analyse des mobiles et interdit, sous risque d'en limiter arbitrairement l'interprétation, de la réduire systématiquement à des actes de droit commun. D'autres auteurs, par contre, se refusent à admettre une conception aussi large de la violence. Ellenberger fait remarquer que le mot violence a acquis, ces dernières années, une extension démesurée et constitue un exemple typique du phénomène que les linguistes appellent « une surcharge sémantique», c'est-à-dire une surabondance de significations engendrant la confusion.

Violence, and especially robbery, belong to the oldest crimes of mankind. Every country has its own traditions of violence. After a robbery at the Kansas City Fair on September 26, 1872, the « Kansas City Times » called the robbery « so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators». Two days later, the «Times» wrote : « It was as though three bandits had come to us from storied Odenwald with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were done that poets sing of. Nowhere else in the United States or in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done ».

Pour comprendre la criminalité et les réactions sociales au crime et à la déviance, dans l'Afrique noire moderne, une démarche heuristique qui dépasse les données et les statistiques gouvernementales est absolument nécessaire. Dans tous les Etats africains, des systèmes de justice criminelle et des codes pénaux, qui sont presque des copies conformes de ceux des pays occidentaux, ont été mis sur pied sans, toutefois, malgré tous les efforts déployés en ce sens, empêcher que les droits coutumiers continuent d’être opérants. L'approche criminologique, pour avoir une certaine pertinence, ne peut accorder beaucoup de crédibilité aux images du phénomène criminel dont sont génératrices les institutions et les agences de prévention, de répression et de traitement car, par rapport à la conscience morale d'une partie importante de la population, ces structures institutionnelles sont en porte-à-faux dans la mesure où elles ne reposent pratiquement sur aucune assises ayant leurs racines dans les croyances et les cultures traditionnelles.

« Money … is the true Fuller's Earth for Reputations, there is not a Spot or a Stain but what it can take out. A rich Rogue nowa days is fit Company for any Gentleman ; and the World … hath not such a Contempt for R'oguery as you imagine». (Peachum [Jonathan Wild], The Beggar's Opera, Act. 1, Scene IX).

This paper will offer a highly schematic and focused explanation of a few features of communal and organised crime at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It will largely concentrate on the negotiated character of criminal and social order. I intend my argument to illuminate the effects of rudimentary policing and some special properties of moral status. That argument has been made possible by a deliberate arrangement of structural metaphors, an arrangement which can be justified only by principles of utility and parsimony. It does not pretend to be comprehensive. Neither is it designed to capture any essential truths about criminal phenomena. Raher, it has knowingly neglected much that would prove interesting. For instance, there is no full discussion of the ordering of moral beliefs, although those beliefs furnished vitally important recipes for political action. There is no attempt at developmental analysis recipes despite the enlightenment which would undoubtedly flow from an examination of the evolution of criminal processes. Mine will be a comparatively simple exercise in social statics, dwelling on the relationships between social distance, crime and the coercive capacity of the state. Such an exercise cannot assign logical or «causal» primacy to the individual phenomena which it describes. It must merely insist on the analytic interdependence of its parts.

Each separate crime is an act of conscious will. The absence of the conscious will element deprives an objective socially dangerous action of its criminal character. That is why the socially dangerous actions of children under a certain age or persons who suffer from mental disorders and are not able to judge their actions or direct them, are not considered crimes. The conscious will element which is present in any crime creates a basis for individual prophylaxis. The prophylaxis can vary. It may include the restraining influence of punishment, the timely suppression of crime by social control, or educative oral measures, directed towards building up a system of attitudes and habits conducive to compliance with the legal norms in a given situation, etc. The effectiveness of individual treatment depends on the degree of our knowledge of an individual's criminal behaviour mechanism; the crime motives, the personality of an offender and the process moulding the latter.