ABSTRACT
The links between social changes and criminality and, although not always obvious, the processes and phenomena concealed behind these two ideas, have long been of interest to sociologists and criminologists. Against this backdrop, ‘criminality’ is most often taken to mean conduct defined as such in official registers (i.e. discourse on criminality is generally published). This may exclude a whole raft of relevant issues connected with the social perception of the dangers of actual crime, i.e. crime that now shows up in statistics and does not provoke a response from the state or its institutions. The concept of ‘social change’ finds application in the description of some very diverse social processes, both progressing on the macro level and observable at the level of local communities. We can discuss social change in its associations with criminality once we have analysed the effects of such events as wars, revolutions, peaceful regime changes, industrialisation, urbanisation and the economic situation. Mass migration, revolutions brought about by technological changes (and all their ramifications), demographic changes, lifestyle changes, the structure of the labour market, the way social functions are performed and the internationalisation of social problems often need to be considered in this context. To all this can be added changes taking place in social consciousness, such as attitudes towards social inequality (and to social organisation generally), the presence of risk in everyday life, ‘truths’ about criminality and how to control it, and cultural diversity. It seems impossible to cite a single commonly acknowledged and universal definition of social change. Piotr Sztompka lists a range of definitions that simultaneously apply in contemporary sociology and then proposes his own (Sztompka 2005). This is fairly general, but for that reason useful, in preliminary deliberations.
