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I am powerless to express adequately my gratitude for the opportunity which makes it possible for me to pay my tribute to one of the greatest minds and noblest characters of all time.
Confining my remarks to criminology in relation to psychoanalysis, I should be quite happy with this limitation were I not aware that the restriction operates to make the simplification of a tremendously complex subject more apparent than real.
Criminology dealing as it does with crime, criminals and criminal justice, includes the detection of crime, and the apprehension, prosecution, conviction, custody, and treatment of offenders although the term 'penology' frequently refers only to custody and treatment (1).
Lawyers and judges tell us in the language of the Penal Code that a crime is 'an act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it, and to which is annexed upon conviction … the punishment of death, imprisonment, fine, removal from office, or disqualification to hold office (2). The sociologist on the other hand makes it clear that a crime is merely an act, a bit of human behavior, which is believed at a particular time and place to be harmful by a group of people strong enough to persuade the legislature to proscribe it as criminal (3).
From either of the foregoing views, crime is ever a changing concept. That is why an act criminal in California may not be criminal in New York, and vice versa; why an act not criminal in Europe may be criminal in the United States, and vice versa; why an act criminal yesterday is not criminal today, and why an act which is not criminal today may be criminal tomorrow.
In any event, the adult person who commits an act proscribed