No. 15 (1981)

This special issue of Crime and Social Justice addresses the decisive shift to the right in criminal justice policies and practices in the 1980s. It explores in depth the shift to the right -- its scope, its context and its underlying political-economic conditions. The issue attempts to understand the totality of this shift in criminal justice and to analyze its relationship to broader changes in the political economy, drawing on articles and commentaries from a variety of progressive social scientists in different regions of the United States and from leading criminologists throughout the world. Contributions came from the East and West Coasts, from the South and Midwest; from prisoners as well as academics; from Canada, Latin America, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. The style of the contributions ranges from brief commentaries and polemics to scholarly, documented articles. The topics similarly range from detailed empirical discussions of internal criminal justice policies and trends to complex analysis of the political-economy on a global scale. Taken as a whole, these contributions explore and investigate different aspects of the shift to the right.