Enkele beschouwingen over prioriteiten op het gebied van het criminologisch onderzoek

Samenvatting

At the request of the secretary of the Council of Europe, some 80 criminologists presented a report on the role & importance of criminological res for the practice & admin of criminal justice. The field of criminology should be categorized as a dichotomy: (a) fundamental res of a purely sci'fic character, & (b) applied criminological sci. A purely sci'fic criminology (or deviology) defines its subject matter not as crime & law (as the applied form does) but as the problems of soc control & the problems concerning the treatment of the individual who behaved contrary to traditional & soc rules. The modern State has monopolized the admin of criminal justice. Its tasks, forthcoming from this monopoly, are: (1) development of substantive criminal law, (2) org & upkeep of the machinery of criminal justice, (3) org & upkeep of the rules of procedure (adjective criminal law), & (4) crime prevention. It was decided that legislation is not a problem of criminal law, criminology or deviology; however, applied criminology has a key problem in this field by explaining the effects of introducing (or not introducing) the possibility of applying criminal sanctions. It is up to applied criminology to construe a rational steering system that can replace the traditional criteria guiding the police & judicial authorities. Legislation, police-officers & judicial authorities are in need of criminological information about the soc implications in the field of adjective criminal law, since (unlike the legal viewpoint) all action taken as a result of a suspicion may function as a sanction. Applied criminology, borrowing its theoretical concepts & thought-systems from deviology & sociol of law, can best tackle the problems of daily practice in a topical way, the topics of criminal policy being formed by way of a tripartition: (A) Traffic offenses & other offenses of small importance. In practice only information about the offense itself is usually available. It would be useful to expand this information with information about the soc context of certain types of offenses. (B) Serious cases--1 yr imprisonment or more: all relevant information is required: information about the offense itself, information about the soc context of certain types of offenses, information about the soc context of the particular offense & information about the offenders' personality & circumstances. (C) Middle-range cases; this group has to be broken up according to a typology of offenses; for each type of offense criminology & law might work out a scheme of information required. AA.