Criminality as a Civilizational Phenomenon: Historical Limits and Future Scenarios

The article challenges the prevalent axiom in criminology regarding the “eternity” of crime. It demonstrates that institutionally recognized crime has only existed for about 6000 to 7000 years. The argument is made that the emergence of stable social structures and formal norms laid the groundwork for crime to develop into a distinct system, which in turn played a significant role in the establishment of law, power institutions, and mechanisms of social control. Four mutually competing predictive vectors of crime are examined: transformational (the evolution of crime in the digital and biotechnological spheres), annihilation (technological and preventive neutralization of crime), vestigial (the gradual disappearance in a post-scarcity economy), and accelerational (the growth of crime influenced by global crises).