CULTURE AND CRIME

Text topic: Culture and Deviance

Text author: Ђорђе Игњатовић

The relationship between culture and crime is illustrated by analysing two topics: the first is the influence of culture on determining the circle of incriminated behaviour as well as the way in which society reacts to crime; the second relates to the effect of certain cultural factors on the genesis of criminal behavior. In this paper, the author analyses the most important contributions of European social thought from the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the Chicago School and its followers and, finally, the British cultural criminology. When it comes to the applicability of the above-mentioned criminological schools to the case of Serbia, it is a real detriment that the tectonic changes that have taken place over the past 100 years (two unsuccessful attempts to create a multinational and multireligious society: both in the Second World War and in the civil war in which Yugoslavia was dissolved; intensive industrialization and urbanization that in the middle of the 20th century led to mass migration from the village to the city; the departure of workers into developed countries and their problems of adapting to a different culture; the collapse of the socialist model and the transformation into capitalism through “robbery privatization” which has led to an alarming stratification of the society...) almost failed to encourage scientists to examine how the related changes in the sphere of culture reflected on the state of crime. The latest wave of refugees from the Near and Middle East who went through the territory of the Republic of Serbia (some of them remaining here permanently) opens up new opportunities for such studies; the same is true for the cultural adaptation of tens of thousands of refugees from the territory of the former Yugoslavia and internally displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija; here we need to mention the subculture of young people, football hooligans, cultural patterns of the so-called ’turbo folk’ and other youth subcultures. Criminologists in Serbia have, therefore, a multitude of possible subjects of research they should explore.