WESTERN CRIME CONTROL MODELS IN THE THIRD WORLD: BENIGN OR MALIGNANT?

The aim of this paper is relatively limited and modest: to classify and discuss the various models which have been and could be used to signify the relevance of the Western crime control experience for the Third World. While the implicitly relevant literature-for example, on the anthropology of law or on the nature of development is vast and complex, the explicit literature on crime in the Third World is sparse and poor. Criminologists have either ignored the Third World completely or treated it in a most theoretically primitive fashion, while the general literature on development and colonialism is remarkably silent about crime. Current systems of crime and deviance control in Western industrialized societies, originated in those three great historical transformations which took place from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, first, the development of a centralized state apparatus for the control of crime and the care of dependency, second, the increasing differentiation of the deviant and dependent into separate types, each with its own attendant body of "scientific" knowledge and accredited experts; and, finally, the increased segregation of deviants and dependents into "asylums," mental hospitals, prisons, reformatories and other such closed, purpose-built institutions for treatment, punishment and custody.