Vol. 27, No. 2 (2000)

Edited by Robert P. Weiss, this 300-page special millennium issue of Social Justice highlights the negative impact of neoliberal globalization on criminal justice, including escalating personal and business crime, growing corruption, heightened antiforeign sentiment and scapegoating that comes with labor migration, greater worker insecurity, and the expansion of a marginalized, contingent work force dependent on the shadow economy. Sections cover new struggles for visibility and social justice, policing the contradictions, penal exclusion of the surplus population, theoretical advances, political reactions, and public policy regressions.

Neoliberalism affects criminal justice everywhere because this free-market doctrine precludes the need for any program of social justice. Contributors to this issue, however, address how democratic governance can be established and how we can create a critical culture. At a minimum, it indicates how we can escape the trap of penal exclusion that has filled prisons with the casualties of the informal economy in illegal drugs and points to the dangers inherent in the privatization and paramilitarization of policing.