ABSTRACT
What follows is an attempt to examine the more relevant factors determining the expansion and distribution of crime. Although it is sometimes denied, crime is expanding everywhere, and more quickly in developed than in developing countries. This is contested by representatives of the former who maintain that, since developing countries lack reliable criminal statitstics, they appear in a better light than developed countries. But not all developed countries have reliable or complete criminal statistics, and the question is not only one of statistical data, but of the connection between development and crime. As a rule, the greater the development the greater the amount of crime, especially when development is understood as socio-economic development in terms of production-consumption and higher material standards of living. The main reasons for the expansion of crime are: (a) that the growing complexity of development usually demands greater penal protection, hence the increase of the number of criminal offences (b) increasing corruption and leisure time: and (c) greater individual as well as collective insecurity and protest against existing socio-economic and political systems, even in countries where everything is run according to a single political ideology, party and machinery. The common denominator of these factors is population growth and its age and sex distribution. It is not true that war, particularly World War II, is the main cause of the expansion of crime, although obviously it plays a part; however, like any other factor, the role of war is ambivalent, in the sense that it provokes but also reduces crime. Furthermore, as a factor the effects of war eventually fade and are replaced by others. Only metaphysically can it be said that by creating new conditions, which in turn provoke others, and so on ad infinitum, war effects are still in action. A close scrutiny of the facts shows that in most cases war is not a sudden event but the culmination of a process, the causal effects of which start acting before the war begins. It is difficult to ascertain what are the criminogenic effects of war itself, those of the process preceding it and those provoked by contemporary but independent factors.
