With this issue, we present to our readers a collection of works of the highest merit. The doctrine section opens with the “Open Letter to a Young Criminologist,” in which Professor Roberto Lyra Filho undertakes, with a master’s hand, a penetrating analysis of the current tasks of Critical Criminology. Next, we publish, in an excellent translation, the remarkable report presented by Professor Peter P. Lejins to the 3rd International Congress of the Criminal Policy Research Center on the crisis of Criminal Policy in the United States, focusing on highly topical issues. Also featured in this section is the study on institutional violence by our permanent contributor, Professor Juarez Cirino dos Santos, presented at the symposium on violent crime organized by the Federal Council of the OAB in Rio de Janeiro in April 1980. From a radical perspective, this work analyzes one of the most critical dimensions of the topic. This section concludes with Professor Manoel Pedro Pimentel’s brilliant lecture on contemporary problems of crime and punishment, which offers a lucid, critical view of the system. In the “Comments and Current Affairs” section, we publish several studies, beginning with Professor Nilo Batista’s paper on sexuality in Rio de Janeiro prisons, presented at the International Symposium on Psychoanalysis held in Rio de Janeiro in October 1978. The reader will also find here studies by Professor Sérgio Demoro Hamilton (“Reflections on the Lack of Authority in Criminal Proceedings”), Judge Silvio Teixeira Moreira (“Pecuniary Penalties”), attorney Antonio Carlos Barandier (“Habeas Corpus: Jurisdiction Ratione Personae and Inept Official Returns”), attorney Celso Delmanto (“Exercise and Abuse of Right in the Crime of Rape”), and Professor Antonio Acir Breda (“Aspects of the Crisis in the Brazilian Criminal Procedural System”). We also publish, in this edition, an excellent legal opinion by the master Hélio Tornaghi on change of venue (desaforamento).In the laws and projects section, several important laws promulgated during the period covered by this issue are featured, including the law granting amnesty (along with its implementing regulations) and the new Code of Minors (Código de Menores).Heleno Cláudio Fragoso
Note: This text is an English translation of the original preface published in Portuguese in the Revista de Direito Penal.