The first part of the book is concerned with the possible contributions of comparative work to criminology. It debates the problem of relativism in comparative criminology, and discusses the way in which theorizing about crime must take account of the particular context to which it is meant to be applied. One article distinguishes and contrasts three perspectives on cross-national enquiry in terms of their respective notions of social change, key causal explanatory concepts, and the relations they posit among law, crime rates, criminal behavior and collective behavior. Additional articles review quantitative studies which use multivariate techniques to explain both violent crime and property crime, and reflect on the attempt to transfer experiences with crime control from one cultural setting to another. The second part of the volume is concerned with the problem of finding reliable data sources for use in identifying and explaining cross-cultural variations in crime and victimization rates. The third section displays some of the better-known attempts to distill general propositions about crime from the cross-cultural record, and considers more focused attempts to isolate similarities and differences in national crime rates and to identify the causes and meanings of crime in different countries. References, notes, tables, figures, appendixes, bibliography, index