Criminologists, in common with researchers in general, have strived for globality. This, of course, has not been easy. The variance in legislation has sometimes seemed to place insurmountable barriers to international comparisons of crime control systems.

Variations in criminal law, however, have come to be regarded as something more than just a drawback. Professor Nils Christie expressed this very well in stating that keeping to the « legal » concept of offences gives researchers new perspectives. Researchers can study why systems differ, instead of just trying to eliminate the differences, or limiting the field of study to one where differences in legislation possibly will not mean so much. Comparisons between different systems may provide researchers with new horizons. This also holds true for research on the use of discretion.

The research reported here consists of a multivariate analysis of the deterrent effect of arrest and conviction on crime rates for Indian states and federal territories for the period 1967 to 1973. The deterrent effect of arrest and conviction are examined separately for six serious offenses with sociodemographic factors introduced into the analysis as control variables.

The last decade has witnessed a number of empirical investigations of the deterrent effect of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment on major felony rates for states, counties, and cities in the United States. As hypothesized, and consistent with the deterrence doctrine, these investigations have rather typically revealed a substantial inverse relationship between the certainty of punishment and offense rates. Contrary to the deterrence hypothesis, however, only a slight negative, and in some cases a positive, relationship has been found between the severity of legal sanctions and offense rates; These findings have brought many American Criminologists to conclude that no longer can the threat and application of legal sanctions be dismissed as an important determinant of crime (Tittle and Rowe, 1974 ; Tittle and Logan, 1973 ; Sjoquist, 1973 ; Orsagh, 1973 ; Phillips and Votey, 1972 ; Ehrlich, 1972). What remains unclear from this line of recent research, however, is the extent to which the results of these studies can be generalized outside of the United States, for to our knowledge, no comparable research has been conducted in other countries. Accordingly, we can only speculate at this point whether similar results would occur if the deterrent effect of arrest, conviction and imprisonment were examined in other than American states and cities.

Public and scientific interest in white collar crime, especially in economic and business crime, has considerably increased in the last few years. Certainly, French scholars, for example, have long since taught « droit pénal des affaires » in their university courses, and « diritto penale commerciale » or « derecho penal economico » is a well treated subject of Italian and Spanish speaking scholars.

Modification of pretrial release procedures occupies an important place on the list of American criminal justice reforms over the past two decades. Prior to 1961, pretrial release was based almost entirely on a defendant's ability to post a bond or cash bail as a guarantee of his reappearance at trial. In that year, the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City began the Manhattan Bail Project, offering judges an alternative to bail as the basis for granting pretrial release. The alternative, known as « release on own recognizance » (or R.O.R.), related the likelihood of reappearance at trial not to a defendant's ability to raise money but to the strength of his community ties.

The fear of becoming victimized, particularly to become the victim of crimes of violence, seems to be widespread all over the industrial nations of the Western world today. According to the official data an increase of the particularly relevant offenses and crimes can be observed everywhere. The increase differs to some extent from nation to nation, only in Japan the trend is out of line, if reports about the past years can be considered to be true. In spite of the increase at present there is no answer to the question, whether the « objective security » or the « real state of security » has become decisively worse for most citizens (outside specific areas, where crime is likely to occur) compared to former decades.

There is no crime which has attracted so much enquiry, complaint and controversy in recent years, nationally and internationally, as rape. Three factors seem to be involved. First, a surprising, and for some people alarming, increase in complaints of (and convictions for) rape in many countries. Secondly, the rise of women's organisations to relieve the distress of those who have been raped and sometimes to secure justice for them — such as Rape Crisis centres, Rape Aid, etc. Thirdly, increasing complaints about the ineffectiveness of the criminal law and especially its male-orientated bias which tends to treat the woman victim almost as if she were the offender by implying that she is making a false accusation or is anyway an immoral woman. It seems almost certain that these three trends are related to one another, and that it represents a shift in culture and mores which the criminal law has to adjust to as best it can.

Le sursis partiel est une institution récemment introduite dans le droit français et qui n'a guère d'équivalents dans les autres législations.

Depuis 1884, le droit français connaît le sursis simple (acuellement art. 734-1 à 737 du Code de procédure pénale): le juge prononce une condamnation à l'exécution de laquelle il sera sursis si le condamné ne subit pas une nouvelle condamnation dans les cinq années suivantes. Depuis 1959 existe, en outre, le sursis avec mise à l‘épreuve (actuellement art. 738 à 747 du Code de procédure pénale): l'intéressé est soumis à une mise sous probation pendant une durée de trois à cinq ans au cours de laquelle l'exécution de la peine privative de liberté est suspendue. C'est une loi du 17 juillet 1970 qui autorise le juge prononçant une peine d'emprisonnement à décider qu'il sera sursis, mais seulement de façon partielle, à son exécution, et cela qu'il s'agisse de sursis simple ou du sursis avec mise à l‘épreuve (sursis probatoire).

In ancient times people resolved or sharpened the conflicts between the offender and the victim at the beginning among themselves (individual revenge, composition) and later on with the help of the state authority or its institutions (composition, punishment). Nowadays, it is difficult to evaluate which was the main reason for the authority's intervention in resolving private conflicts. Let us quote two examples. Vasiljevic is of the opinion that in the old accusatory procedure the pursuit could have been abandoned even if necessary, due to the lack of knowledge, incapacity or intimidation of the victim on one hand and on the other, it was possible to charge the person for the reason of revenge or other negative motives. He refers to the comedies of Aristophanes illustrating the deficiencies of private accusatory procedure (Vasiljevic, p. 18). In the opinion of Mueller and Cooper « the rights of selfhelp were regulated and formalized by the state so as to limit their exercise and theoretically, to prevent divisive feuds and the exploitation of the weak by strong… By the Middle Ages, the individual harmed in any way must always have recourse to law rather than taking the matter into his own hands. In terms of victim compensation, the price of state assistance in bringing the wrongdoer to justice soon becomes disproportionately high» (p. 86). After this time the interests of the victim have been replaced by the interests of the authority. From the sociological point of view the interests of the victim have been the most neglected in the inquisitory procedure.

Police anywhere are problematic as a public institution for a variety of reasons, such as their authoritarian and adversarial role, the fact that they can legally use force, the opportunities for corruption they are offered, lack of agreement over the morality they enforce, and the fact that they must act quickly in situations where only limited information is available.

The English police are of interest in this regard because they occupy a rather unique position in appearing to be more loved than hated, something that can hardly be said for police in most other countries. The degree of consensus and voluntary compliance with law, though easily exaggerated by the anglophilic American, seem more pronounced than in most other countries.

There are many ways in which the criminal justice system may be seen. We may focus upon the information which is passed along various channels and attempt to relate the record to ideas about actual behaviour. On the other hand we may take the view that whatever decisions are made, they are made on the basis of available information, irrespective of its quality. And there are processes which lie somewhere between these two approaches. Information which is believed to be more reliable may be more frequently selected as a basis for decisions, or items regarded as unreliable may be compared and combined with others and inferences made accordingly. For the accused who is caught up in the machinery of the system the whole system may be seen as a network of decisions made by persons in authority, treating him rather like a truck in the railroad marshalling yard. He may have some vague idea of what causes the «points» to be switched, but the location of any «point», whether correctly or incorrectly set, will determine his location at any time in this network.

One explanation for the dearth of comparative studies of penal severity is the unhappy reality that such endeavors inevitably encounter methodological problems of a forbidding nature. While some problems of conceptualization and measurement have proven to be insurmountable, thus precluding the testing of theory in a definitive, universal sense (accross all jurisdictions and for all time), such impediments should not deter prospective researchers altogether. While a few problems will remain intractable, others can be mitigated or circumvented through a judicious choice of measurement strategy and research design. What does exist for the comparative researcher is the inviting opportunity to formulate general propositions, then to test them in a succession of different, albeit limited settings (Zetterberg, 1966. pp. 126-8).

Il est devenu courant, surtout depuis une dizaine d'années, de parler de crise du système pénal.

L'une des premières idées qui soit alors venue à l'esprit a été de se demander si ce sentiment de crise ne provenait pas essentiellement du monument législatif — voire jurisprudentiel — par rapport à l'évolution de «l'opinion publique».