This issue focuses on comparative and theoretical issues in criminology and builds on efforts to deepen our understanding of conceptions of justice and criminal justice policies in socialist and Third World countries. The United Nations, the International Society of Criminology, and individual scholars urged North American criminology to examine non-Western, noncapitalist models of justice. Scholars in Third World and socialist countries reciprocated in dialogues and debates with criminologists and policymakers from the United States and other core capitalist countries. The issue discusses the work of Hungarian criminologist József Vigh as well as youth crime during Soviet glasnost. In the U.S., the emergence of informal justice systems is analyzed and compared with existing popular judicial systems in socialist countries. Continuities and changes between the Reagan and pre-Reagan eras in selected aspects of the U.S. criminal justice policy are examined, as are theoretical issues, such as critical criminology's relationship to Marxism, the Rusche-Kirchheimer thesis, and the relevance of quantitative theory.