International Journal on Criminology Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2013 | Page 3

International Journal on Criminology––Volume 1––Number 1––Fall 2013
Foreword
A
ccording to my colleagues at the University of Montreal, criminology “is the
multidisciplinary study of the criminal phenomenon”. It makes use of the
humanities and social sciences (psychology, sociology, law, etc.) to understand
the crime, the criminal, the victim, criminality, and society’s reaction to crime.
Although everyone is aware of the criminal phenomenon, particularly through media
exposure, the public understanding is often anecdotal and fragmentary. The criminologist
looks beyond the headlines and takes a rigorously analytical and critical approach to
criminality. He begins by analyzing the crime, before examining the type of intervention
employed.
Criminology is also an applied discipline. The criminologist is trained, for example,
to decide whether a prisoner should be granted conditional release, or to propose a
strategy for tackling an explosion of vehicle theft in a parking lot. He thus develops risk
prevention and risk management strategies that take into account the dynamics of crime
and the ethical and political stakes surrounding it.
There are many journals covering criminal law, the criminal sciences and sociology,
but very few international criminology reviews. We therefore aim to provide a space for
open-minded dialogue, comparison, and criticism, which takes into account diverse
approaches while avoiding sterile arguments about the nature of the discipline itself.
A crime is the unique combination of a perpetrator, a victim, and a set of
circumstances. Its individual and quantitative analysis requires scientific methods and
specific intellectual and technical abilities.
In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim emphasizes that “[…]
A number of acts can be observed, all with the external characteristic that once
accomplished, they provoke this particular reaction from society known as punishment.
We make of them a group sui generis, on which we impose a common rubric. We call
any punished act a crime and make crime thus defined the focus of a dedicated science:
criminology.”
Such is the scope of this review.
!
Alain Bauer
French National Conservatory for Arts and Crafts, Paris
John Jay College of Criminal Justice. New York
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