With this issue of Crime and Social Justice we continue the project begun in our last issue on "International Lawlessness and the Search for Justice," a search for those global structures affording a durable peace and ultimately the survival of the human species. The continuation of this search in the present and upcoming issues reflects our belief in the absolute and urgent necessity to foster world understanding, mutual respect, and peaceful coexistence.

Ours is one world community on one small, fragile globe, and its very survival is threatened by the arrogant lawlessness of an American administration that daily demonstrates total disregard for the sovereignty and rights of any other nation. The Reagan administration has not only attacked the United Nations, the world's one, albeit imperfect, existing forum for the peaceful settlement of global conflicts, but also continued an illegal war against the sovereign nation of Nicaragua, incensed the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust with Reagan's visit to Bitburg, and threatened the globe with World War III through its constant aggression against the socialist states and revolutionary movements from Central America to Cuba, Africa, Central and East Asia, the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria (in a cynical effort to associate the Bulgarians with the attempted assassination of the Pope). Anticommunism and the Cold War are in essence antihuman, for they feed the impetus to war.

If mutual respect and peaceful coexistence are to be the hallmarks of our world community, then the heart of jurisprudence and international law must be open understanding and a willingness to see the world from another's point of view. Our journal's contribution toward this end is a commitment both to oppose the unbridled lawlessness and militarism of the U.S. government and to promote greater understanding of the other nations and social systems with which we share the world.

Socialism and Criminal Justice

It is in this context that this issue of Crime and Social Justice begins to explore alternative futures in law and criminal justice. On a global scale, there is clearly a crisis in criminal justice and law related to the more general crisis of capitalism. Where do we turn for indicators of alternative legal systems?

Alongside the constitutional and judicial norms of the West has arisen and matured a socialist system of legality, both innovative and humane, and concerned with the "whole man" in determining guilt or innocence, not just the specific facts at hand; it is a system genuinely designed to reform, re-educate, and rehabilitate, not humiliate.

The accumulated experience of the socialist countries in forging a "socialist legality" -- a legality fitting conditions in which the objective causes of crime such as human exploitation, poverty, lack of education, etc., have been or are being eliminated -- has demonstrated that the journey toward genuine crime prevention, security of one's person, and social justice proceeds with one foot in the recent past and the other in the future. People construct their future with what they have at hand. The Nicaraguan, Cuban, Soviet, and Polish experiences touched upon here speak to enormous achievements; in the context of unremitting hostility and war issuing from the Western capitalist powers, they have constructed new states from the ashes of the old and in the process forged a jurisprudence that is very progressive by Western standards.

The initial hubris accompanying the first bold experiments in popular justice has waned because it has been undermined by the necessities of national survival. For the U.S.S.R., all hopes for completely abolishing the police and standing army and for a "withering away of the law" were dashed early on by the counterrevolution; the Cuban Revolution was compelled to pit revolutionary principles against the operative mosaic of criminal and penal codes inherited from Spanish colonialism, the prerevolutionary republic, and the Sierra Maestra days; and revolutionary Nicaragua has only now begun the process of fashioning a criminal code to supplant the one inherited from Somoza, even as the contra attacks are waged on its borders and in the interior.

Our Institute has only recently begun to undertake an extensive study of existing socialist states. We wish to see with our own eyes and hear from the mouths of average socialist citizens as well as scientists what has been done and what remains to be done to construct a more human world. Of course tremendous problems remain to be solved in those countries attempting to revolutionize legal institutions. They are the first to admit that far from spontaneously "withering away," crime, delinquency, and new violations of the constitutional order such as social parasitism persist in the postrevolutionary state. Corruption and alcoholism remain significant problems.

In Nicaragua, for example, individuals engaging in fraud and theft of goods destined for subsidized markets sell them at enormous profits through the private market. The government took the initiative to root out economic crime with the formation of a National Commission of Struggle Against Corruption. Politically, the head of the Sandinista Police, Doris Tijerino, framed the problem this way:

Those arrested for such crimes have admitted on their way to jail that their efforts were facilitated by persistent shortages that afflict the Nicaraguan economy -- economic sabotage being a central element in the CIA's illegal war against that country. For Nicaragua, when equipment destined for hospitals and medical clinics is purloined for self-enrichment, it can mean the difference between life and death. This form of crime concretely jeopardizes survival, and consequently 34 people have already been sentenced to jail for Health Ministry thefts. A similar campaign has been in progress in the U.S.S.R. for some time now, with severe sanctions.

Contrast this with the endemic corruption and fraud in the United States. A recent example to add to Edwin H. Sutherland's roster of corporate criminality is the systematic, felonious defrauding of over $50 million by executive and lower-level personnel of the E.F. Hutton & Company brokerage firm (New York Times, May 17, 1985). In the process, Hutton overdrew its checking accounts by some $10 billion, bilking small banks (and therewith their depositors) in a sophisticated check-kiting scheme that daily gave Hutton access to an average of $150 on which it, not the depositors or small banks, received interest. The company received the maximum fine of $2 million (not including additional legal fees and repayment of the swindled interest)! Was anyone personally responsible for this crime? Not a chance! The "firm" did it according to the Attorney General's office.

Future Plans

Crime and Social Justice will continue the search for alternative futures. Concretely, by the time this issue has gone to press, the June 1985 delegation to Cuba sponsored by the Institute will already have completed its work of observing the human rights situation there and undertaking a research project on the Cuban legal and judicial system. The findings of that delegation will be published in a future issue of Crime and Social Justice. Other forthcoming issues will be dedicated to (1) analyzing the role of the United Nations in the International Legal Order, its judicial bodies, its conventions, prohibitions against crimes against humanity from genocide to apartheid, and the inequities stemming from North/South disparities; (2) the Hidden Economy and Crime, from anthropological, comparative, legal, and futurist perspectives; and 3) Crime and Justice in Canada and the United States. These special theme issues are being produced in close collaboration with Betty Elder, Cyril D. Robinson, and R.S. Ratner, respectively.

We also plan to greatly expand our "Book Review" section, stressing cluster reviews, quick and concise critical appraisals of friends and foes alike, as well as our traditional essay reviews. At the same time, we will begin section documenting human rights violations taking place within the Unite States; we will give a voice to serious reflections on the state of U.S. prison conditions in our "Prison Notebook" section. We ask for your contributions in all of the areas outlined above, and hope that this and future issues will continue to stir debate and provoke controversy.