To speak of "connections" between Canada and the United States in the context of ongoing bilateral trade negotiations is, to be sure, the epitome of understatement. Close ties between the two countries were made egregiously transparent by the April 10th incident on the Nevada nuclear test site. A $70 million underground blast exploded through safety shields, and increased levels of radioactivity were subsequently detected in the western Canadian province of British Columbia (Vancouver Sun, May 16 and June 21, 1986). A three-week cover-up by U.S. authorities ended with the admission that radioactive particles had, indeed, been ventilated from contaminated tunnels. While the world watched for menacing cloud formations drifting from Chernobyl, Canada may already have suffered an unwelcome visitation from "Chernobyl-on-the-mesa" to the immediate south. The incident was but another, if unusually stark, reminder that Canada does indeed exist in a continental reality.

Although most Canadians are reluctant to accept the fact of the North American polity, the massiveness of the U.S. presence in Canadian affairs is undeniable. Even Canadian government officials now acknowledge that interest rates and energy prices are determined in Washington, not Ottawa, and that national security has been contracted out to the Pentagon. But unlike his predecessors, Brian Mulroney, the Canadian Prime Minister and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, openly favors a North American perspective, one that has brought about the dismantling of the Canadianization provisions of the National Energy Program, and the recasting of the Foreign Industrial Review Agency into a virtually unscreened business development corporation. Efforts to steer a Realpolitik course between accommodation and subservience have also resulted in indirect support for President Reagan's cherished Strategic Defense Initiative, direct support for Cruise missile testing over Canadian territory, and public (if unenthusiastic) endorsement both of the U.S. decision to resume production of chemical weapons and of the widely condemned U.S.-air strike against Libya.

In unreciprocal fashion, Canada was excluded from crucial meetings of major industrial nations intended to reduce the value of the U.S. dollar (though such meetings had obvious consequences for Canada's trading position); Canadian environmental interests have been slighted with respect to the location of nuclear dump sites, toxic pollution in the Great Lakes, and acid rain action; and "free trade" negotiations, presumably undertaken to enhance productivity and increase employment opportunities in both countries, have been conducted in an atmosphere of protectionist restraints and growing threats to Canadian political and cultural sovereignty (Watkins, 1985). A recent issue of The Economist went so far as to recommend that Canada throw in the towel and become the 51st U.S. state, despite the absence of Canadian movements for political union with the U.S. On the contrary, the Mulroney Government's "special pleading" approach to relations with the U.S. has been criticized in many quarters as "colonial," and the former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, even advised Mulroney to "stop kowtowing" to Reagan (Vancouver Sun, October 26, 1984).

The issue of Canada's integration with the United States is a long-standing one, ranging in outlook from Moffett's (1907) American expansionist stance to Clarkson's (1985) Canadianist critique of U.S. hegemony. In various studies published over the last 25 years, Canada-U.S. relations have been examined typically with respect to trade, industry, labor relations, foreign policy, defense, and culture. Seldom has any scholarly attention been given to the problem of social control, especially to the way in which criminal justice operates across the two countries.

It might be expected that a marked shift toward continentalist integration would be reflected in the arena of social control, or even that social control practices would aim to facilitate such integration. And contemporary trends support this view: the privatization of social control as another means of retrenching publicly funded state programs is moving northward under the pressures of prison overcrowding (Globe and Mail, July 20, 1985); the Canadian government has been embarrassingly compliant in such matters as the extradition of American Indian Movement activist, Leonard Peltier, and in failing to press vigorously for compensation to the Canadian victims of bizarre CIA brainwashing experiments conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, granting increased powers to an appointed judiciary and thereby limiting Parliamentary sovereignty, looks to be a first major step toward an Americanization of the justice process in Canada.

It is likely that the historically conservative Canadian courts will now act in a manner that fosters an even higher sense of individualized, rather than collective justice, thus stopping new progressive programs through emphasis on individual claims, and solidifying the neoconservative philosophy already prevalent in government circles in the United States (Romanow, 1986). Nevertheless, the sociological literature surveying criminal justice linkages between Canada and the United States, which is far from considerable, now displays an antiquarian flavor in focusing on the contrasts between the quasi-authoritarian and secretive workings of the Canadian state -- "crime control model" -- and the traditional American passions for open administration and individual rights -- "due process model" (Hagan and Leon, 1978; Lipset, 1985).

The extent to which social control strategies in Canada and the U.S. may be converging in response to roughly similar fiscal and legitimation crises has so far attracted only scant attention (Ratner and McMullan, 1983), and even the most informed Marxist analysis of crime and social control in Canada (Taylor, 1983) portrays Canadian criminal justice through comparison with problems arising in Britain under Prime Minister Thatcher's troubled regime rather than with the more relevant but less understood example of the United States. There is new optimism, however, that under the rubric of "political economy," it is now possible to develop a theoretically cogent social science able to examine general questions, such as the viability of a nation-state under the conditions that Canada faces, and also more specific cognate questions, such as those pertaining to criminal justice in an era of continentalist gravitation.

Key conceptual categories in this undertaking are state, law, mode of production, and the role of ideology, most of which are omitted in the specious control-oriented criminological research and policy-making that have held sway in Canada, and which, if unchallenged, would almost certainly hasten economic and political homogenization with the U.S. Attempts to apply a political-economy perspective to Canadian social problems, however, have been criticized as either hyper indigenous and inadequately articulated in the context of world capitalism, or overly reliant on neo-Marxist formulations that neglect unique Canadian aspects (Clement and Drache, 1978).

The problem of melding abstraction and detail within a political-economy perspective is not insurmountable, as demonstrated in the work of Stuart Hall and his associates at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in England (Hall et al., 1978). Interested in examining the "moral panic" of mugging in Britain in the early 1970s, they rejected conventional crime interpretations of "mugging" in favor of a more historical and structural view that identified the critical forces that produced "mugging" in its specific form.

The idea of "historical conjunctures" as a guiding analytical format, while presented only discursively in Policing the Crisis, offers promise of credible interface between structural abstractions and specific cultural phenomena. The notion of "domestic conjunctures" is presented as an application of this idea in Ian Taylor's studies on "law and order" constructionist movements in Britain and Canada. In some respects, of course, there is nothing new about the idea of historical conjunctures as it represents a kind of historiography that is a staple analysis among socio-historians. But in its persistent focus on structural contradiction, and in its richly textured dialectical analysis (i.e., the precise historical conjuncture as always an effect of both macro-historical processes and micro-transactional processes), conjunctural analysis could serve to elucidate the meaning of concrete phenomena, such as events transpiring in the criminal justice arena understood against the backdrop of historical and contemporary Canadian-U.S. relations.

In preliminary fashion, five levels of conjunctural analysis can be described -- going from the most abstract to the most concrete -- that would necessarily constitute part of a holistic approach to the study of crime and social control: global, national, regional, sectoral, and organizational.

1. At the global level, we are examining structural contradictions in their broadest manifestations -- those that refer to the modes of production and the distributive orders of the world-system economy, and to fundamental contradictions emerging within dominant economic and political systems, such as the increasing organic composition of capital, socialization of production, the falling rate of profit, geopolitical alliances, world population and international debt crises, and recapitalization strategies. At this level, conjunctural analysis bears on problems of crime and social control in locating the parameters for the activities of transnational corporations, in establishing the pressure points on working-class emiseration, and in prefiguring the rationale for oppositional politics -- all of which pertain to events and processes that filter into changing definitions of the "crime problem," and which instigate markedly different strategies of crime control. For Canada, the most important issue at this level, with clear implications for crime and social control, is the nation's capacity to liberate itself from the role of resource exporter, to move toward value-added production and a wider-based manufacturing economy, and to remove international barriers to that transformation.

2. At the national level, we need to examine, in particular, Canada's relations with its most influential economic, political, and military partner, the United States. Considering the magnitude of the overall U.S. influence on Canada, there is, as noted earlier, surprisingly little research on how the profile of the Canadian state coercive apparatus is shaped by U.S. ties. The contradiction between the Canadian search for nationhood and the simultaneous quest for economic security, prompting closer affiliation with the United States, is reflected in Canada's ambivalence toward the current "free trade" negotiations. A further loss of economic independence and/or submission to U.S. cultural hegemony would have powerful effects on the way problems of crime and social control are viewed in Canada, ranging from the increased permissibility of daily violence to the unfettered legitimation of war.

3. At the regional level, contradictory movements operating at different ranges of intensity within Canadian society pit provincial against federal forces. The efforts of central government authorities to guarantee individual political enfranchisement via, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, compromises subcentral autonomy, a tension registered in the Charter provision allowing provinces to override constitutional entitlements. What comes to be legally declared as either the "rights" or the "punishable violations" of individual citizens will depend upon judicial interpretations that cannot be isolated from the wider economic processes that frame capital-labor relations and which vary regionally by historical experience and marketable resource capacity.

4. A fourth level of conjunctural analysis is sectoral. Within both provincial and federal arenas of government in Canada, what sectors, ministries, or departments of government are accorded fiscal and legislative priority, and for what reasons? Clearly, the fundamental contradictions occurring at the global, national, and regional levels will impact Ministry agendas differentially, ultimately influencing the categories and prevalence of crime as well as the corresponding forms of social control.

5. A fifth specifiable level of conjunctural analysis is organizational. The way resources are distributed within a particular organizational sector (e.g., the Department of Justice) will greatly effect the epidemiology of crime, since acts that elicit official sanctions are to some extent a function of organizational strategies (e.g., whether control is exercised through channels of legitimation or repression). Such outcomes hinge on the relative autonomy of the criminal justice sector and of its organizational subcomponents (police, corrections, judiciary, etc.), whose actions, in turn, are delimited by the nature of the state in Canadian society (e.g., whether, and to what degree, the state is identified with particular class interests). Thus, the ascendancy of any crime control policy, and the hierarchy of control agents within the state coercive apparatus, must be linked to the priority-shaping processes that are traceable even to the global level.

Of course, all of the above is highly schematic and merely hints at what would count as a methodology of conjunctural analysis. What should be apparent, however, is that a research and policy-formulating enterprise organized around these conjunctural levels and their integration would set aside the recurrent objections leveled against political-economy analysis in Canada -- that it is either culturally overdetermined and theoretically barren, or that its theoretical abstractions are detached from concrete historical circumstances.

Coming, at last, to the contents of this issue, two years ago, in an effort to break new ground for critical criminology and to pry open some of the mysteries of state collusion between Canada and the United States in the area of social control, I proposed to the editors of Crime and Social Justice that they devote an issue of the journal to the theme of "Canada and the U.S.: Criminal Justice Connections." Happily, they accepted my proposal, showing either uncommon interest in the workings of Canadian justice, or sympathy for the subversive tone of the theme. I was invited to serve as Guest Editor, a fleeting honorific prelude to the chore of soliciting relevant contributions for the issue from my Canadian colleagues, whose meager response to the call for proposals was perhaps indicative of the impenetrability of the problem. Only seven pieces were deemed appropriate for inclusion in the issue, a paltry total compensated by excellent quality. In addition to the original analysis that they offer, the articles serve to illustrate aspects of what I have described, in rudimentary fashion, as conjunctural analysis.

In the opening article, "Marketing the New Establishment Ideology in Canada," Paul Havernann examines the general Canadian conjuncture in terms of the ideological challenges now being presented to the traditional liberal/social democratic consensus by a U.S.-cloned, neoconservative think tank, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. The ideological thrust of the Fraser Institute, which exemplifies the degree to which continentalism has generated a consciousness in Canada, has been to pave the way for a strong state (or "exceptional state") formation. This necessarily entails a repressive brand of criminal justice meant to contain the social discontent arising out of the installation of monetarist policies that suit the requirements of transnational corporations functioning at the global level. Where the Fraser Institute mentality has taken root in Canada, such as within the Social Credit government of the province of British Columbia, and in some university settings and church movements, analysis of regional factors influencing the new politics of hegemony is required to understand and oppose the advances of the New Right.

The second article in the issue, "Continental Capitalism and Crooked Lawyering," by Charles Reasons and Duncan Chappell, is an attempt to understand the organization of the legal profession in Canada and the United States, mainly through analysis of the relationship between corporate lawyering and the nature of "continental capitalism." This is a departure from conventional studies of the nature of social control in the legal profession, which typically focus upon the personal and social characteristics of those lawyers who are officially sanctioned. Analysis of economic ties between Canada and the United States provides a wider context for understanding the political economy of lawyering and the role of the legal profession in upholding barriers to substantive equality.

Ian Taylor's article on "Martyrdom and Surveillance" explores certain oddities of the Canadian social control culture, notably the ostensible efforts of the Department of the Solicitor-General to propagate an ideology of democratic "community policing" in the context of the characteristic Canadian deference to authority. The sacrosanct heritage and relative autonomy of the RCMP enables police organizations to exploit highly conservative and loyalist traditions, while also assimilating an "Americanization" of police practices that expand surveillance capacities and further remove the police from local controls. Thus, police activity in Canada is even less regulated than in the United States; and problems of police accountability are compounded by the gap between the reality and the ideological rhetoric of policing in Canada, encouraged by statist programs emanating out of the Justice Ministries.

In his article on "The Legalization of Prison Discipline in Canada," Michael Mandel examines a current paradoxical feature of criminal justice. The Canadian courts, following constitutional entrenchment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1979, which was, in turn, spurred by developments in American jurisprudence, have accepted jurisdiction over the legal status of prisoners. While this has resulted in procedural due process reforms affecting prison disciplinary procedures, there have been no substantive changes in penal administration; indeed, the actual rate and level of punishment has remained the same. Mandel interprets the increasing prominence of the courts in the adjudication of prisoners' claims as an aspect of the general "legalization of politics," in which the courts have been called upon to resolve political controversies to forestall social change and solidify the political status quo. Mandel sees this legalization trend as occurring throughout the capitalist world in response to the legitimation crises fueled by postwar capitalist adversity. The form and pacing of the legalization of Canadian politics and prison discipline observes global parameters, which can be traced through the economic and political domination exercised by the United States over Canada since the 1940s.

In "Out of the Fiscal Shadow," John Lowman and Robert Menzies show that fiscal crisis explanations of carceral trends in Canada and the United States fail to elucidate the developmental logic of control policies. A broader political-economy framework of state control is needed, one that encompasses social welfare, criminal justice, and military expenditures. This holistic "transcarceral" model of social control clarifies the basis for determining what, indeed, constitutes a "crisis," and reveals the coordinates of institutionalized power amongst the different sectoral control cultures within society. Multi-institutional control (e.g., the "carceral archipelago" of Foucault) reinforces the inequalities of class structure as the human dross of capitalist economy is subject to perpetually stigmatizing interventions by agents of the transcarceral system. Comparisons of carceral trends in the U.S. and Canada are therefore incoherent without analysis of both the institutional sectors of state power and the macroeconomic forces that undergird their connections.

Robert Gordon's article on "Financial Abuse of the Elderly and State 'Protective Services'" examines a social problem afflicting both Canada and the United States -- the population aging process, which places intense pressures on each nation's eroding fiscal base. State strategies to cope with sources of elder abuse and neglect, and simultaneously to reduce the impact of aging on diminishing social welfare budgets, are moving away from the enforcement of criminal laws in favor of less costly public "protective" services, which are designed to bring the assets of elderly persons under state control at an early stage. This would prevent situations wherein the elderly might become dependent on the state for support as a consequence of the squandering or misappropriation of their assets. Public trusteeships allow for economies of scale, and may even provide a significant source of additional revenue for the state; consequently, they are more desirable than the alternative strategy of privatization. But statist interventions of this sort represent a shift in the application of penalty from abusers to victims, since, in this case, the regulations governing incompetency are likely to make the elderly more vulnerable to a premature takeover of their assets. These and similar "preventative" strategies are motivated by changing economic and demographic characteristics of the North American conjuncture, and are becoming a distinct component in the "penal-warfare" complex in Canada and the United States.

The selection of articles concludes with Brian Burtch's biographical synopsis and "Interview with Claire Culhane," the long-term Canadian prisoners' rights activist and advocate of prison abolition. The interview explores Culhane's thoughts on the range of social control strategies now being undertaken by the Canadian state (under the influence of U.S. hegemony), as well as her ideas about the prospects for radical praxis in halting the reactionary trend toward adoption of the "punishment model" in official control policy. Culhane's personal confrontations with agents of the Canadian and U.S. social control establishments offer an inspirational example of human fortitude pitched against the massive structural forces sustaining the North American control culture.

In sum, the articles written for this issue have new relevance for understanding crime and social control in Canada, and suggest new analytic routes for elaborating a political economy of crime. A common concern is the way in which the growing convergencies between Canadian and U.S. experiences, in large part an outcome of the asymmetrical relationship between the two countries, increasingly determine social control policy in Canada. These developments are interpreted along the lines of conjunctural analysis, with a focus on the domestic conjuncture in Canada as primarily an artifact of U.S. attempts to recoup dominance in a period of capitalist exigency. This trend is less visible -- although now open to scrutiny -- in the area of social control, a research direction that can also help to clarify the possibilities for resisting austerity policies forged in the United States, either through revival of indigenous Canadian traditions, or by creating new political and economic alternatives to the Draconian "solutions" imposed by the New Right.

I should not conclude this "Introduction" without thanking my colleagues in the United States and Canada who carefully evaluated the papers that were submitted for this issue, and also the editors of Crime and Social Justice for making these pages available to their relatively disadvantaged Canadian brethren. We have no radical criminology journal in Canada, so there are few local outlets for critical scholarship in this field, much less whole issues devoted to exploratory themes. Yet we are not discouraged, and we trust that we have rewarded the editors' confidence that we have something to say. Assuming that the issue is well received by its readers, this has been one occasion when Canada's dependent relationship to the United States was anything but ignominious.

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