"On crime, more than on most matters," wrote Bertram Gross in the last issue of Crime and Social Justice, "the Left seems bereft of ideas." We agree with this assessment. As we noted in our previous editorial, "radical" and "new" criminology have made important contributions to exposing the ideological underpinnings of bourgeois criminology; to demystifying the real economic, social, and political functions of the criminal justice system; to debunking the premises of liberalism; and to breaking out of the conceptual straightjacket of "criminology." It is now time, however, to go beyond a "radical" criminology that simply "exposes" the horrors of capitalism and the injustices of the criminal justice system.

To do this, we need to develop theoretical work that is much more sophisticated and complex than the vague eclecticism of "radical" criminology, most of which is fixated at the empirical and perceptual stages of knowledge. But such theory must not be generated in ivory-towered exclusion, unless we wish to merely become a debating club for coffeehouse intellectuals and "socialists of the chair." Radical criminology has its roots in the political ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s; it has a tradition of praxis that, until the demise of the civil rights, antiwar, and prison movements, gave it a bold and enterprising quality, despite its political immaturity.

We need to revive this tradition of praxis in criminology, while at the same time learning from past mistakes. It is not enough to be muckraking critics. The times call for much more than alienated exposés of social injustice. Each day we read of new atrocities and new victories for the Right: the prison population has grown to an all-time high of almost 400,000, with an unprecedented increase of 6.9% in the first six months of 1982, according to the latest report from the Department of Justice (San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 1982); in Biloxi, Mississippi, some 27 prisoners were killed and many more badly injured in a fire that swept through a dangerously overcrowded, unsafe county jail(New York Times, November 9, 1982); a federal appeals court has just ruled that the National Security Agency may routinely monitor electronic messages between U.S. citizens and persons in other countries, even if there is no presumption of criminal or subversive activities (New York Times, November 7, 1982). It is events such as these that require us to develop concepts and programs as weapons of action that can inform practical interventions.

Consequently, the theme of this issue is "Remaking Justice," and most of its contents address the critique that Bertram Gross has raised. The first section of the journal, "Social Justice and Social Policy," is entirely concerned with the need to develop a progressive alternative to the Right's law-and-order campaign against the working class. We begin with contributions by two prominent socialist sociologists from England, Ian Taylor and Alan Hunt. Following the rise of the Right in Britain, as exemplified by both Thatcherism and neofascist parties, there has been considerable debate in England about the demise of a social democratic consensus and the rapid successes of the Right.

The failure of the Left to "take crime seriously" is addressed by Taylor and Hunt, taking up a debate begun by Stuart Hall, E.P. Thompson, and other intellectuals in the British Left. The backgrounder on "The Repressive Side of Monetarism," written by the State Research collective, provides a broad political-economic framework for understanding the material roots of the rise of the Right in Britain. John Clarke's article on welfare in Britain raises important questions about the successful campaign by the Right against welfare in a former bastion of the "welfare state." As the New Left in the U.S. lobbied against the "tyranny of rehabilitation," so its equivalent in England mobilized its constituency against the degradation and divisiveness of welfare. Now that the Right has also taken up the campaign against rehabilitation and welfare, albeit from a different political perspective, the Left finds itself theoretically and strategically confused. This is the dilemma that Clarke discusses with respect to welfare in Britain and that Francis Cullen and John Wozniak address with respect to rehabilitation in the U.S. The parallels are clear and illuminating.

We include several other contributions that address progressive alternatives to right-wing law and order in North America. Tony Platt critically assesses the failures and weaknesses of the New Left, and calls for a program of action that links immediate reforms with long-term strategies. Joseph Bute, speaking from his experience as a community organizer in Chicago, echoes Bertram Gross' call for economic and social reforms at the local level. Claire Culhane, a prison activist in Canada, discusses the need for an increase in the level of tactical militancy in the prison movement. Finally, the whole book review section of the journal explores the problems that progressive teachers face in the classroom and recommends textbooks that can be used to combat the ideology of law and order.

Most of the contributions to this issue address the crisis of the Left in the advanced capitalist countries of the core. By contrast, Rosa del Olmo reports on the efforts of the revolutionary government of Nicaragua to "remake justice" in a small, peripheral nation, faced on the one hand by external hostility and measures of destabilization (by the U.S. government and its surrogates in Central America) and on the other hand by the internal contradictions that necessarily accompany the construction of socialism. We have a great deal to learn from the Nicaraguan experiment in proletarian justice in our own efforts to remake justice in the core nations of the capitalist West.

We by no means consider this issue of the journal to be a complete or finished statement about progressive alternatives to right-wing law and order. On the contrary, it is only a beginning. We plan to continue the discussion in future issues and we welcome your comments, letters, and articles on the issues raised in Crime and Social Justice No. 18.