EN :

This article is about social change and it has Denis Szabo 's writings as a starting point. We compare the 1960 and 1970 affluent society delinquency with the 1980 and 1990 scarcity society delinquency. We conclude that withstanding structural and modal personality changes, the nature and the level of self-reported delinquency of adolescent did not change. We introduce the notions of homeostasis and homeoresis to explain these results.

EN :

Crime relationships are often inconsistent at different levels of aggregation for good theoretical reasons. That is why we should avoid committing the fallacy of composition, namely, drawing inferences between individuals and aggregates or from one level of aggregation to another. The routine activity approach becomes part of the solution.

EN :

The paper deals with the following question. To what extent do the human efforts at controlling crime succeed ? It starts by proposing an enlarged concept of social control. In the second part, a theory of choices made by offenders under the constraint of social control is put forward. In the last part, it is argued that social control can have four types of impacts :

I — reducing the frequency of crime; 2 — reducing its severity; 3 — rendering obsolete some criminal tactics and stimulating the development of new ones; and, 4 — channeling offenders toward vulnerable targets. It is concluded that crime is shaped by the means used to control it, meaning that a given state of crime rates should be seen as the result of what people decide to do and not to do about crime.

EN :

In this article, the author describes the evolution of diverse types of homicides committed in Quebec from 1954 to 1989. The four main categories dealt with are : the settling of accounts, quarrelsome and vindictive homicides, homicides associated with another crime, and familial and passion homicides.

The author shows that each of these forms of homicide have a particular evolution. The percentage of settlings of accounts greatly increased between 1968 and 1976 and differs from other categories in that it involves a series of homicides linked with gang wars (Cordeau, 1991). Quarrelsome and vindictive homicides triple between 1968 and 1975, whereas familial and passion homicides only doubled during this period. With regard to homicides associated with another crime, contrary to the other categories of homicides and violent crime, it stabilized from 1968 on, but knew a relatively large increase between 1954 and 1968.

Finally, the author mentions that these changes bear little resemblance from one category to the other, involving considerable variations through the years in each of these categories of homicides.

EN :

In the last three decades, a number of researchers have undertook the comparison of American and Canadian crime rates. Among them, Lipset (1990) and Hagan (1991) have shown that violence was more frequent south of the border than north of it. To explain why crime was more frequent in the US than in Canada, those authors argued that differences in values and culture of each country's residents was the principal determinant of this situation. Using regional and infranational disaggregated crime rates, this article shows that differences in both country's crime rates are not univocal. For example, crime rates in Canada are not higher than those of Northern United States for three crimes out of four studied. What makes US crime rates appear much higher than the Canadian ones can be attributable to a small number of States and cities which have extraordinarily high crime rates.

EN :

One of the most important developments in juvenile justice systems in the western countries over this century has been the 1970s crisis of the well established welfare model, a crisis based on the lack of rights in juvenile procedures, the ineffectiveness of treatment interventions and the failure to decrease delinquency in society.

The reaction to this situation assumed different forms in different contexts, and showed numerous contradictions.

In some countries the justice model, an adultisation of juvenile justice, became dominant; in other countries the «back to justice » movement was not accepted, and other models developed.

In the actual organisation of juvenile justice some trends emerged : deinstitutionalisation, diversion and community alternatives to custody, the utilisation of private resources and volunteers inside a public network and bifurcation between serious and normal offenders.

The crisis of the welfare model and critical aspects of the justice model for juveniles has stimulated experts and policy makers to search for new paradigms, such as, for exemple, delinquency management, reparation and mediation, which probably represent important elements of the future of juvenile justice systems.

EN :

The purpose of the paper is to present some reflexions on the cultural relativity of victimization. It argues against the widely held belief among victimologists that victimization can be universally defined. Like crime, victimization can be seen as a cultural construct. The paper presents many examples illustrating the cultural relativity of victimization. Children's work, child abuse and neglect, violence, abortion, sexual behavior etc. are given as examples to emphasize the variability in the definition from one society to another. The author concludes by proposing comparative research covering various aspects of victimization.

EN :

The conditions and the rules of practice in clinical settings limit the client's right to confidentiality. These limits are reviewed in the case of criminologists : some limits are legal while others refer to the context, the expectations and the reticences shared by the speakers in presence.

In regard to past crimes and s elf-incrimination, these questions raise fundamental issues both to the level of ethics and administration of the penal justice. Besides the latter, is there a place for moral justice in our social control system ?