"Struggles for Justice" occupied a prominent place in the earliest issues of Crime and Social Justice. With the demise of the School of Criminology at Berkeley and the concurrent separation of practice and theory in "radical criminology, " this section was dropped from the journal's format. Whatever the practical reasons underlying this decision, we now see that it was a serious error, leading to an idealist and scholastic tendency in the journal in the late 1970s.

The first two issues of CSJ, published in 1974, included a variety of articles on subjects such as community control of the police, the role of progressive lawyers in community struggles, the prisoners' movement, and the San Quentin Six case. This was a time when there was considerable political activism around criminal justice issues, and CSJ served as both a clearinghouse for information and a forum for critically evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of specific projects and struggles. Today, most of these organized struggles no longer exist, given the demise of the prison movement, the brutal repression of the black community, and the failure of "community control" of the police. But the hard times and reactionary political conditions of the 1980s will inevitably generate new forms of activism and resistance against horrendous prison conditions, against unaccountable policing, against the repressive policies of Reaganism.

We invite contributions that describe and critically analyze "Struggles for Justice. " We reopen this section with a powerful evocation of Malcolm X Day at Attica prison and a report on the significant political trial of a Chicano activist.