International Journal on Criminology

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Upcoming Conference Annoucement:

The 5th Annual International Criminology Conference will be held on

Friday, November 5, 2021 at the Quaker Meeting House in Washington DC

For more information go to: http://www.ipsonet.org/conferences/crim-conf

The PSO announces a new bi-annual peer-reviewed journal:

International Journal on Criminology.

Aim and Scope

According 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 Journal.

Alain Bauer

The journal's Editor-in-Chief, Alain Bauer, is Professor of Criminology at the French National Conservatory for Arts and Crafts (Paris), and Senior Research Fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (New York) and the University of Law and Political Science of China (Beijing).

For more information on this project please contact Daniel Gutierrez, PSO Executive Director, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Online ISSN: 2333-9861