This study of crime and criminal justice in Germany's Second Empire contributes to both historical sociology and social history. As a work of historical sociology, it employs the abundant social and economic statistical data of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany, buttressed by qualitative data generated from an analysis of popular perceptions of criminal justice activity and unlawful behavior, to test several important theories about the effects of urban–industrial development and societal modernization on the incidence of criminal activity. As a study of social history, it investigates the nature and values of the German criminal justice system and the ways in which the law and criminal justice institutions and practices were applied to uphold the social and political order. Whereas it demonstrates that the law, police, attorneys, and judges all rated high marks for technical expertise and high educational standards, and that their efforts helped to ensure that German society remained quite orderly, the often discriminatory justice they dispensed exhibited some disturbing parallels between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich.

Imperial Germany, despite a trend toward increasing violence around the turn of the century, was one of the safest societies in modern history, with some of the lowest rates of interpersonal violence. This statement can be made with some confidence: Foreign travelers often remarked on how secure they felt in German cities; the contemporary sociologist Emile Durkheim found Germany and Holland to have the lowest homicide rates in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century; and our own more detailed examination of Germany's homicide rates can now be shown to have compared favorably with the rates of other countries, which recently have been reconstructed painstakingly by other criminal justice historians for countries like Sweden, Holland, England, and the United States.