Crime and Social Justice (CSJ) emerged in the early 1970s at a time when the universities were in political and ideological ferment. It was essentially a product of the student movement and antiwar activism, both of which brought a political vitality to North American academic institutions that had been quiescent since the black student movement of the 1920s and the organizing by Communist Party intellectuals in the 1930s. Although the student movement or New Left was a predominantly petty bourgeois phenomenon, it played an important role in exposing the myth of academic neutrality, in politicizing a new generation of activists, and in at least disrupting the normal functioning of academia. While the depth and persistence of the student movement took the academic bureaucracy by surprise in the 1960s, once assessed and investigated, it was quickly reduced to impotence in the mid-1970s through a judicious blend of repression, cooptation, and collaboration. With the end of universal conscription and the consequent dissolution of a mass movement on the campuses, the New Left quickly evaporated. Bowing to spontaneity, belittling the importance of theory and strategy, disconnected from and generally hostile to working-class movements and to Marxism, and cut off by the Cold War of the 1950s from a long tradition of organized resistance, it is not surprising that the New Left degenerated into liberal reformism on the one hand and ultra-leftist dogmatism on the other.

"Radical" criminology, like other variants of radicalism in the social sciences, developed in the specific historical period and political-cultural constraints of North American universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The difficulties that students and intellectuals faced in developing a coherent radicalism was of course related to the milieu of professionalized repression that had characterized the academy for over 50 years. Faced with a fundamentally hostile environment (explicitly antagonistic to Marxism) and without the experience of Marxist traditions, the new generation of radical intellectuals expressed their resentment of liberalism in much the same way that the utopian socialists of the early 19th century expressed their opposition to bourgeois rationality. The New Left in politics and ideology often substituted moral indignation for scientific analysis. "Radical" social sciences were little more than a debunking exercise, providing no theoretical alternative to corporate liberalism and offering no genuine framework from which to ask the centrally significant questions of modern society. Moreover, the separation of radical ideology from practice (which predominantly characterized radicalism in the university after the demise of the antiwar movement) further impeded the development of Marxism because, after all, Marxism is a guide to action. By the late 1970s, the final nail in the coffin of academic Marxism was the systematic purging of progressive intellectuals, so systematic that today it is almost impossible for intellectuals and students to seriously pursue even an academic investigation of Marxism on the campus.

The emergence of a "radical" criminology in the early 1970s was a significant intellectual development, given academic criminology's notoriously conservative and repressive past. Prior to World War II, there was some diversity in the field and some of the leading scholars in criminology, such as Orlando Lewis, John Lewis Gillin, Harry Barnes, Thorsten Sellin, and Blake McKelvey, were at least aware of the materialist roots of crime and punishment (though they were not by any stretch of the imagination Marxists). Sellin, for example, even introduced the first American edition of Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure (1939) as a "stimulant to thought which all too few publications in this field of research provide." After World War II, however, fueled by McCarthyism and the unchallenged domination of liberalism, criminology became increasingly technocratic and myopic.

The expansion and growth of the economy in the 1950s kept unemployment in check. Moreover, the relative economic prosperity of the post-World War II period generated a sufficiently large tax base for the government to develop social programs, expand the public sector, and experiment with "community-based" corrections and crime prevention programs. Criminologists, like other members of the expanding professional sector, benefited from this cycle of economic growth and eagerly climbed on the bandwagons provided by both Johnson's "Great Society" and Nixon's "War on Crime." For some 20 years, criminology was dominated by a brand of liberalism that was openly hostile to Marxism, that operated under the delusion that technocratic policies could solve political-economic problems, and that even turned its back on the liberal-materialist traditions prior to World War II.

With the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the ghetto revolts, and other economic and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the premises and security of liberalism were severely shaken. In the context of this ferment, a "radical" criminology emerged. Considering criminology's "direct organic connections with the most coercive political institutions in our society," wrote Herman Schwendinger in his editorial to the first issue of Crime and Social Justice in 1974, "it is not surprising that radical developments emerged later in criminology than in other disciplines and professional schools. Radical criminology actually appeared on the crest of the final surges of social protest by women, blacks, the poor, students and many others whose rage had scourged American institutions throughout the previous decade."

The center of "radical" criminology in its formative years was at the School of Criminology in Berkeley. Here, in the midst of the student and antiwar movements, a handful of progressive faculty, together with a large pool of politicized students, taught radical courses, participated in local political projects, and initiated CSJ. The first issues of the journal expressly linked theory with practice and, due to the influential role of Herman Schwendinger, made Marxism an important theoretical component of the journal's radical pluralism. But "radical" criminology at Berkeley was short-lived. After a prolonged struggle against a blatant act of academic repression, the School of Criminology was closed in 1976 and CSJ's staff and supporters were dispersed all over the country. By the fifth issue of the journal (Spring-Summer, 1976), there was no longer a section on practice and struggles. For a couple of issues, there was an attempt to decentralize CSJ's administration, but this proved to be impractical and unworkable, resulting in a lowering of the quality of the journal's contents and a very uneven theoretical perspective.

The repression and dispersion of the School of Criminology at Berkeley fundamentally disrupted the consolidation and development of "radical" criminology in the United States. Without a stable base of support, without a milieu in which progressive intellectuals could be trained and developed, it was very difficult to preserve a coherent ideology. For a while, "radical" criminology became increasingly unguided and disorganized, reminiscent of Engels's description of the utopian socialists: "a mishmash permitting of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mishmash of the less striking critical statements, economic theories, and pictures of future society." The terms "radical criminology" and "new criminology" were quickly co-opted and diluted, for the most part emptied of their genuine radicalism, and used as a fashionable mantle to cloak everything from muckraking exposés to liberal reformism. Richard Quinney, who built his career as the leading "radical" criminologist in the United States, added to the confusion by publishing huge amounts of materials that were generally crude, undigested, and dogmatic. Not surprisingly, the opponents of "radical" criminology seized upon Quinney's shallow scholarship and opportunistically equated it with Marxism.

Despite these problems, CSJ prevailed and managed to keep its bearings after an unstable period following the demise of the School of Criminology at Berkeley. In 1978, beginning with issue No. 9, the editorial and administrative aspects of the journal were centralized in Berkeley and San Francisco, where a core of progressive criminologists remained after the closing of the School of Criminology. Since 1978, CSJ has been a journal of the Institute for the Study of Labor and Economic Crisis (ISLEC) in San Francisco. ISLEC is an independent, progressive research institute that was founded in 1977 as a result of the systematic exclusion, censorship, and harassment of Marxists and other radical scholars in the established universities. It is this association with ISLEC in the last four years that has allowed the journal to maintain relatively high standards, to increase its circulation, to be taken seriously throughout the field, and to retain a commitment to a serious, nondogmatic Marxism.

It is now eight years since CSJ was first published and four years since it became associated with ISLEC. It is time for an assessment and for some changes in order to meet the new conditions of the 1980s. With this 17th issue of the journal, we introduce a new format and some new directions.

The economic and political realities of the 1980s necessitate our new direction. With over 10 million people officially unemployed in the United States, the standard of living of the majority of the population is under severe attack. It is now nine years since the end of the Vietnam War, and so far military mobilization has not been used to artificially lower the rate of unemployment. The burden of stagnation, inflation, and declining productivity is being placed on the backs of the working class in the form of drastic cuts in social programs, deregulation of business, increased subsidies for the giant corporations (national and multinational), and the gutting of regulatory agencies -- in sum, the systematic destruction of liberal policies associated with the New Deal and the relative prosperity of the 1950s.

Under Reagan, the proposed solution to the current economic crisis (which is a global crisis of capitalist overproduction) entails a systematic economic, political, and ideological attack on the material gains and rights that working people have won in the last 50 years. We are witnessing a mobilization of conservative economic and political power, a "reactionary counteroffensive," to use Andre Gunder Frank's phrase. In the areas of criminology and criminal justice, this means an alarming growth in the rate of imprisonment; an intensification of institutionalized racism in the penal system; a horrendous deterioration in penal conditions due to overcrowding and cutbacks in social programs; a steady increase in serious "street" and corporate crimes, both of which primarily victimize the poorest strata of the working class; an organized and purposeful political movement, mobilized by the conservative right wing of the ruling class, to widen the net of criminalization and to impose more severe punishments on working-class, especially minority, crimes; and the growth of political repression, new forms of political witch-hunting, and the "unshackling" of the FBI and CIA.

The new format of CSJ is designed to address these grave conditions. First, Theory and Research will attempt to integrate criminological issues into a larger body of knowledge, notably Marxism and world-systems theory. This is designed to cut through the vague eclecticism of "radical" criminology and to deepen the level of theoretical work in criminology. We are forever discussing how crime and criminal justice cannot be understood without reference to the social structure, political economy, global economic crisis, etc. Now is the time to analyze these larger "structures" and to demonstrate their interconnections with crime, prisons, repression, etc. For example, we already know a great deal about the relationships between incarceration and unemployment rates, austerity policies and crime, political-economic crisis and repression, and "law and order" and the Right. Now is the time to deepen our understanding and analysis of these relationships, to put the insights of "radical" criminology into a coherent and scientific body of knowledge.

At the same time, given the systematic repression of and mindless prejudice against Marxism in North American universities, we recognize that it will not be an easy task to do this kind of serious theoretical work. Consequently, Pedagogy is designed to address this problem by providing materials for both group and self-study. The contents of this section will range from course outlines to complex discussions of theoretical and methodological issues.

To correct the tendency toward idealism and scholasticism in CSJ, we are introducing a section on Social Justice and Social Policy. Here we will focus on programmatic and policy issues. In the past, we have been able to do persuasive critiques of government policies. Now, more than ever, we need debate and discussion about alternatives to "law and order." In particular, we must begin to develop progressive programs for addressing the penal crisis and the serious problem of "street" crime.

With the growth of the Right -- not only the extralegal organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and right-wing "interest groups" such as the Moral Majority, but also the conservative wing of the ruling class -- we think that it is necessary to have a special section on State and Right-Wing Repression. Here we will include in-depth research on and analysis of important right-wing movements, as well as updates on legislative trends. At the same time, Struggles for Justice will describe, report on, and analyze contemporary popular movements and progressive forces that are organizing against the forces of repression and reaction.

Finally, we plan to retain a section on Book Reviews and, in particular, to make sure that our readers are kept informed about new developments in criminology and about progressive literature from all over the world.

We would very much like your comments about this new direction that CSJ is taking. Also, we very much hope that you will make your own contributions to the journal by sending us articles and ideas for future issues.