A paper presented to the International Course in Criminology on the Non-Institutional Treatment of Offenders, Lagos, April 1970.

Nigeria now has an excellent oppartunity to pause and consider the future development of its penal palicies. Reconstruction Js the byword today, and hand in hand with economic and palitical reconstruction must go the devising of new strategies for the control of social affairs. Above all, the search must be for solutions which are peculiarly appropriate to Nigeria in the 1970 s. Many basic assumptions need to be questioned, particularly those which have been inherited uncritically from the colonial era. An untold amount of domestic research needs to be carried on but equally the government must look outward to the rest of the world and tum the successes and failures of other nations to the benefit of Nigeria.

In this paper I shall concentrate on some of the problems and the practical results of the most important types of non-institutional treatment of offenders in Denmark. The main part of my report is centered around the results of a few investigations and an experiment on the effectiveness of these measures applied on the Danish legal and social background. However, as an introduction, I shall give a brief survey of the appropriate part of the Danish legal system and some, mainly demographic and criminal statistical, data about Denmark

As the theme of this meeting is Non-Institutional Treatment of Offenders, I shall only treat cursorily the psychiatric factors in the process that gets the offender committed, and devote more time to the committed offender.

Under African customary law, the payment of blood-money by the offender to the injured has been the traditional means of redress for criminal wrongs. As we have elsewhere dealt with the matter (1), we need not here enter into the problem of whether traditional African law distinguishes between crimes and civil wrongs or between public and private wrongs. It is sufficient to state that it does, although various African societies (and, indeed, all others) have their own classifications of what are crimes and what are civil wrongs.

Le nombre des études consacrées à des thèmes criminologiques proprement dits a été restreint pendant ce semestre dans les revues de psychiatrie et de psychanalyse analysées ici. Par contre, comme au cours de la précédente chronique, nous rapporterons des travaux psychiatriques dont l'incidence en criminologie nous paraît importante.

E. de Le Court. — « La police judiciaire près les parquets », p. 3 à 55.

La police judiciaire près les parquets a été instituée en Belgique par une loi du 7 avril 1919. L'histoire de sa création et son évolution au cours de ces cinquante dernières années font l'objet d'un article substantiel et détaillé de M. de Le Court, procureur général près la cour d'appel de Bruxelles. Le mérite prindpirl de cette étude est de Her l'aspect institutionnel de la police judiciaire aux problèmes de la lutte contre la criminalité.

1. — Actualmente, en muchas naciones (no en todas) las relaciones entre la policía y la sociedad en general son pocas, débiles, despersonalizadas, y mas negativas que positivas (no hablamos aquí, por ejemplo, de Inglaterra, donde los policías, los Bobby, reciben frecuentemente muestras de respeto y afecto de los ciudadanos).