The history of crime and criminal justice has made some major strides forward in the last decades. These studies, however, have rarely explored the 20th century. There are at least two reasons to focus on this time period: Firstly, this phase saw multiple social and cultural changes. Especially the 1970s are often seen as a transitional period from modernity to post-modernity or as a phase in which the erosion of the welfare state began. Although new historical works have begun to analyze the decades from the 1950s onwards by integrating social science perspectives, crime and criminal justice aspects, these are still fringe topics in this context. Integrating crime and criminal justice history perspectives in this may enhance these current innovative and interdisciplinary projects and debates. Secondly, there are important methodological, conceptual and theoretical issues at stake in analyzing the second half of the 20th century. While a number of master narratives have been used to describe and analyze pre-20th century crime, such as 'modernization', 'urbanization', 'vol au violence' etc., a fundamental debate on the conceptual and theoretical tools to be applied for writing a 20th century crime and criminal justice history has not been initiated yet. Interestingly, ‘culture of control’ is now widely used as a master narrative for describing changes of crime and crime control during a transitional phase which started somewhere in the 1970s. Moreover, there are two approaches which come close to be used as catch all concepts to explain nearly all aspects of rising crime rates and the growing public awareness of public order issues in the second half of the 20th century: The concept of media induced ‘moral panics’ and the ‘broken window’ thesis. Only very rarely, however, are these findings put into a historical context, which should take into consideration that both approaches have their roots in the 1970s. Contributors aim at integrating interdisciplinary methodological debates as well as case studies on significant aspects of crime and criminal justice history of the second half of the 20th century.