NCJ Number
149633
Editor(s)
G Kaiser,
H Kury
Date Published
1993
Length
36 pages
Annotation
This report provides an overview of the most important research projects conducted by the Criminological Research Unit of the Max Planck Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law during the last 5 years.
Abstract
The research developments promoted by the institute and the results achieved since the Tenth International Congress of Criminology in Hamburg in 1998 are included. This report thus continues where the preceding conference volume ("Crime and Criminal Justice. Criminological Research in the Second Decade at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg") left off. The first volume of the two-part report addresses research activities on domains of "Crime in the Environmental and Economic Sectors" and "Justice Administration Research- Cohort Research Sentence Imprisonment." The one research project on environmental crime focused on basic problems in environmental criminal law from a criminological perspective. The one research project on economic crime examines the "dual nature of moral costs." This study notes that in explaining criminal behavior, economic models refer to the social environment of the offender; whereas, norm theories focus on the moral values of the offender and his/her personality traits. The research had the premise that both conceptual approaches have their limitations and that a combination of individual and situational factors is required to account for the phenomenon of criminal profiteering. Five research studies focused on sentence execution in justice administration. The second volume of the report presents the results of the 11 studies on "Victim Research¦Restitution." The Criminological Research Unit has conducted empirical studies of victimological issues since the beginning of the 1970's; however, it was only in the last few years that it conducted the first national victim surveys in the territory of the former Federal Republic of Germany as well as that of the new Federal Lander. Special emphasis has been given to the methodological aspects of victim surveys.