Suchergebnisse

Legal history -- Statistics, trends and techniques -- Evolution and psychoanalysis -- The British Marxist historians -- The city and its' criminals -- Foucault's project -- Women, gender and crime -- Colonial and international

Between 1919 and 1939, crime received a prominent place on the international public agenda. This book explores the blueprint for twenty-first century international crime prevention - The League of Nations approach - which established institutions for confronting dangerous drugs, traffic in women and terrorist violence.

"We live in the age of international crime but when did it begin? This book examines the period when crime became an international issue (1881-1914), exploring issues such as world-shrinking changes in transportation, communication and commerce, and concerns about alien criminality, white slave trading and anarchist outrages"--Provided by publisher

We live in the age of international crime, but when did it begin? In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Great Britain confronted crime problems believed to have originated beyond its borders. In a world tied together by inter-continental railways, undersea telegraph cables, and ocean-going steamships, trouble in 'far away' places jeopardised domestic pursuits. London was feared to have become the centre of professional thievery, alien criminality, the white slave trade and anarchist bomb plots. The problems were even bigger, or so it seemed, than the biggest empire. Representatives from Britain met with counterparts from Germany, France, and the United States for a series of international conferences . They discussed causes and strategies, but could not always agree about solutions. A new profession also emerged, the criminologists, who claimed to have discovered in science a universal means of crime prevention.

Despite increasing concern about the threat of global crime, it remains difficult to measure. During the 1920s and 1930s, the League of Nations conducted the first social‐scientific study of global crime in two studies of the worldwide traffic in women. The first study included 112 cities and 28 countries; researchers carried out 6,500 interviews in 14 languages, including 5,000 with figures in the international underworld. By drawing on archival materials in Geneva and New York, this article examines the role of ethnography in developing a social‐science measure of global crime threats. The discussion covers the Rockefeller grand jury and formation of the Bureau of Social Hygiene; the League's research in Europe, the Americas, and the Mediterranean; controversy concerning the use of undercover researchers; the League's research in Asia; and the end of the Bureau. The League's experience demonstrates the promise of multisite ethnography in research about global crime as well as the difficulty of mapping crime on a global scale.

AbstractDuring the past two decades, crime rates have declined in Europe and North America. A number of explanations have been offered for why this has come about, but there has been much less discussion about what governments should do now. This article considers the policy implications of an international crime decline with a focus on the relationship between crime reduction and social welfare. The discussion here includes the possibility of a convergence across social welfare improvements, the danger of misreading the USA as a trend‐setter, the potential of the Scandinavian way in situational crime prevention, the chance of persistence in high‐crime politics and the dilemma of realizing social policy objectives from crime reduction initiatives.

The music hall affair in 1930s Malta serves as a window into wider social, political issues embodied in the recurring furore that was `white slavery'. Sparked by accusations in London newspapers about sexual exploitation of English women who had come to work as music hall artistes, politicians, newspaper editors, the police and the church in Malta addressed the issue. Although the claims about English women were not true, the stories raised larger questions about prostitution in Malta's night-time leisure economy, and sexual exploitation of foreign artistes and Maltese barmaids did occur in this context. The British reaction followed the pattern of response in other colonies: military authorities chose to focus on the health threat to their personnel posed by what they saw as an indigenous problem of prostitution, rather than acknowledge the effects of colonial rule on local society. Maltese authorities chose to avoid political and economic truths of colonial rule as well: they decided to make the immoral character of the women involved the problem to be addressed. The music hall affair did not champion international human rights, but reflected parochial fears of foreigners and colonial others.

Joseph Semini, a police inspector, became Malta's first criminologist when he published the first criminological text, Some Points on Criminology, in 1926. Although this text incorporates conceptual language borrowed from Lombroso, it would be wrong to dismiss it as an extension of the scuola positiva. Some Points on Criminology can really only be appreciated when framed within political affairs in Malta during the 1920s and 1930s. This article discusses Semini's criminology in the context in which he wrote it; his perception of the problems that motivated his writing and the source of ideas that influenced his approach to them. Although the book appears to have had little influence at the time, it is significant because he pursues an alternative to colonial criminology. Colonial criminology relied on analogies with Great Britain to understand Maltese crime problems and sought to develop Maltese institutions of criminal justice from British models. In bringing what Semini took to be an international science of criminology to the Maltese context, he was able to conceive of a more authentic Maltese response ; peer-reviewed

Michael Polanyi's Jewish identity contributed to his philosophical outlook. His life in a Hungarian-acculturated, nonobservant Jewish family in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his experience as a Jew emigrating from Hitler's Germany; and his thoughts about Zionism informed his theory of knowledge. During the late 1930s and 1940s, he worked to reconcile his Jewish identity with his commitments to Christianity, and this tension contributed to his thinking about the nature of scientific discovery. The malapropism baptized Jew characterizes the scientist on the verge of discovery, one who occupies a twilight world between adherence and apostasy with regard to the scientific community.