From the editor: Reflections on 40 years of Social Justice.
Shank, Gregory
Social Justice, initially called Crime and Social Justice, emerged
40 years ago on the UC Berkeley campus as one of the critical
publications and voices generated nationally and worldwide by the mass
mobilizations of 1968. The journal's founders were an
intergenerational mix of activist faculty and graduate and undergraduate
students in the School of Criminology, then famously besieged by
conservative forces within and outside academia. A significant component
of the movement to save the school organized to form the Union of
Radical Criminologists, which oversaw three autonomous projects: the
Crime and Social Justice journal; a rape crisis group; and a police
study group that later developed into a research center in conjunction
with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), producing the
foundational book, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of
the U.S. Police. Each of these focus areas, including the hemispheric
perspective, became enduring features of the journal. Although the
institutional basis of the movement was quickly eviscerated by the
academic administration, the expulsion process seeded far-flung
departments with radical scholars. The loss of its base in the
university posed a threat to the journal's survival, but its
subscriber base has made its independent publication possible to this
day. Eventually located in San Francisco, the journal persevered as a
coordinating center and valued source of knowledge accumulated by
individuals and organizations confronting police repression, the
carceral apparatus, and the machinery of war. Its goals remained to
question everything, to reconstitute one of the most reactionary fields
of academic discourse (promoting something akin to justice studies over
technocratic police training or an FBI academy), and to envision a world
system based on human need instead of profit.
We were the echoes of Selma, Saigon, San Quentin, and Savio in
Sproul Plaza, of the intersecting movements struggling for women's
equality and academic freedom, mobilizing against J. Edgar Hoover's
COINTELPRO and the assassination and imprisonment of black and Latino
leaders, and protesting the factories in the fields and Roosevelt's
wartime internment of the West Coast Japanese. As such, the journal gave
voice to signature revolts of the era: against the immoral US war in
Southeast Asia, the transfer of electronic battlefield tactics from
Vietnam to the US borderlands, the torture training of foreign
dictators, and CIA-sponsored coups such as the overthrow of Chile's
Salvador Allende; against the forces undermining the promise of the
civil rights movement, which had sought to fully enfranchise all
Americans politically and economically; against the multiple faces of
the oppression of women, including rape, intimate violence, the battle
over reproductive rights, as well as deep-seated economic inequalities;
and against a university system that churned out ideas and programs that
justified America's imperial role abroad and the ongoing
polarization of wealth and poverty at home through economic means and
insidious forms of criminalization of entire communities. At the time,
few perceived that the 1968 moment had peaked, or that an intense,
decades-long counter-reaction was unfolding that would reverse many of
the earlier egalitarian gains.
Contents and Lived History
The pages of Social Justice have reflected general thematic
consistency over four decades, expanding from an initial critical
criminological focus to a more explicit global perspective and tracing
links between militarism, domestic repression, and ecological damage (as
our friend Bill Chambliss also attempted to do with Contemporary
Crises). This was also necessary because writings by critical scholars
on crime and justice, even worldwide, remained meager. After fifteen
years of publishing, we changed our name to Social Justice: A Journal of
Crime, Conflict, and World Order, as many former NACLA members joined
the editorial board when Contemporary Marxism became unviable. Our
critiques of US intervention abroad intensified, extending analyses of
domestic crime control and conflict resolution to crimes against
humanity, human rights, and peoples' rights. We retained our
audience of social reformers, community organizers, and prison
activists, but also addressed the broader interests of critical scholars
engaged in social justice research and practice.
In the 1970s the journal published foundational analyses on the
emergence of the prison, the transition from private detectives to the
professional policing of labor and dissent, the emergence of female
criminality, the institutional practices for dealing with victims of
rape, the export of counterinsurgent police technologies, and the
development of new modes for controlling prisoners and parolees. Early
volumes tracked manifestations of radical criminology analytically and
organizationally, including experiences of nonhierarchical pedagogy. The
prison movement began to falter and its external support was severely
weakened; intense repression was directed at the Black Panther Party,
whose printing presses had cranked out our first issues.
From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the journal was associated
with the Institute for the Study of Militarism and Economic Crisis, and
for many of the latter years, it reflected the energetic editorship of
Tony Platt and Paul Takagi. Our graphic-intensive large format gave way
to the smaller size typical of academic journals. Inside the covers, we
chronicled the decisive shift to the right in criminal justice policies
and practices. Sandwiched between Nixon's Watergate and
Reagan's Iran-Contra scandals was the brief interregnum of a
right-center Trilateral Democrat, Jimmy Carter, whose covert support of
the anti-Soviet Taliban and al Queda in Afghanistan produced blowback
that anticipated today's war on terrorism and the NSA's
panoptic digital surveillance. We noted the alarming rise to prominence
of "intellectuals for law and order"--in particular, the
"new realists" and sociobiologists, whose ideas and programs
were becoming the dominant trend in criminology and the established
program of the Reagan administration. Many liberal anticommunist
intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s, revealed by Ramparts magazine as
paid assets of the CIA's propaganda machine, hardened into
neoconservatives and Reaganites. There was a growing insistence on
repressing domestic terrorism, despite well-acknowledged declining rates
of internal political violence. We countered with progressive
alternatives to crime control, critiques of counterterrorism and
countersubversion, and a condemnation of the newly established
high-security units that marked a rejection of all vestiges of the
rehabilitative ideal (education, skills acquisition) for the general
prison population. The journal explored parallel developments in Canada
and Australia, and looked at their consequences primarily for African
Americans at home.
We also witnessed the growing corporate ascendance in politics, and
we analyzed the Moral Majority's cultural war and the struggle over
reproductive rights that sought to reverse Roe v. Wade. In economics,
Reaganomics and Thatcherism began to overturn New Deal gains for
American workers and labor in the UK. Globally, militarism took the form
of massive Cold War defense spending and covert rollback efforts that
created "predatory states" by providing material support,
communications infrastructure, police and military training, and
guaranteed impunity to ultra-right politicians and generals in Latin and
Central America and to apartheid and neocolonial structures in Southern
Africa. Although Nixon had exploited the war on drugs for its
interventionist potential in the South and expanded federal penetration
of US communities, the legacy of Reagan's financing of right-wing
counterrevolutionaries (contras) through drug sales was manifested in a
flood of illicit substances into the United States and an ongoing,
largely unsuccessful policing of cartels. This policy also drew
militaries into a web of corruption. At that time our journal became
engaged in a conversation with critical scholars in El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Cuba, and Latin America on human rights, the use of
aerobiology in the drug war, and transnational crime.
In 1988, Social Justice became a quarterly journal. The cataclysmic
events that ushered in the 1990s--the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
less momentously, of the New Communist Movement in the West--provoked a
major reorientation and rethinking of the revamped geopolitical world.
In contrast to the Cold War, decolonization, and the national liberation
struggles of the previous period, the intellectual milieu became
muddier. Issues increasingly discussed globalization, transnational
capitalism, neoliberal ism, and the United States as the sole
superpower. We witnessed the transition in South Africa under the
African National Congress-- a prelude to the similar stunning reversals
of Reagan's rollback in Central and Latin America that would
follow--and the historic fall of monolithic parties in Japan and Mexico.
Our pages covered the repercussions to what turned out to be the swan
song of Republican politics in California, which attacked affirmative
action and bilingual education, introduced anti-immigrant English-only
initiatives, and undermined the safety net for the poorest sectors.
Nationally, Bill Clinton implemented his infamous welfare reform and
vastly expanded the police. Prison privatization got serious, and a
private security industry emerged internationally. We took on
immigration as a civil rights issue for the Americas, joined Native
Americans in putting Columbus on trial at the Quincentennial, and
reviewed the Attica rebellion twenty years after.
During our last fourteen years of publishing (2000 to 2014), we
witnessed the September 11,2001, attacks, George W. Bush
administration's "regime change" invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan, the exposure of a torture and secret prison apparatus, the
perfection of drone warfare, a global financial collapse, the election
of America's first black president, and an unprecedented
public-private invasion of privacy under the mantel of national
security. Our coverage of the US "gatekeeper's state" and
the criminalization of immigration .detention, and deportation
intensified, as did our focus on resistance to the prison-industrial
complex. We covered the emergence of new movements to transform
violence, whether interpersonal or as a weapon of war. With the anti-WTO
demonstrations and the Occupy Movements, we reported on the policing of
protest and youth. We also examined the war being waged over public
education, with increasing corporate control over schools and
communities. Recently, we published articles on the Arab Spring and the
latest cycle of global protests, as well as analyses of the destructive
effects on communities of the real estate foreclosure crisis.
How Do We Measure Our Impact?
In numbers, our 133 issues sit in libraries across the globe, and
our digital archive is included in all major online collections and is
accessible worldwide over the Internet. We have published the work of
1,317 authors, and 65 individuals have joined us as guest editors. Every
submission we receive is evaluated by two reviewers and benefit from
their comments as well as our careful editing. We have voiced sustained
opposition to policies on imprisonment, the policing of people of color
and protest, environmental crime, welfare reform, and the war on (some)
drugs. Our articles provide an alternative source of information for
scholars and activists and insist on applying universal norms of justice
to unchallenged power and unchecked market economics. We analyze and
urge reversals of destructive policies such as mass imprisonment,
selective drug prohibition, and police killings of civilians; we support
the rights of communities and individuals to live free from oppression;
and we advocate for a more just production and distribution of wealth,
globally and locally. There are only a few critical scholars in our
fields of interest who have not been featured at one time or another on
our pages; and we are proud of our contribution to the production and
circulation of transformative ideas.
In the United States, however, the near absence of viable
oppositional movements or even of vibrant labor unions poses problems
for journals such as ours. For instance, progressive faculty face
difficulties in advancing professionally if their work goes to
alternative journals instead of to deep-pocket publishers that offer a
more academic patina. Moreover, critical voices have always been
underrepresented in studies of crime, punishment, and social welfare
policy--with each area dominated by systems-supporting academic
disciplines or directly controlled by the government through grants. A
second major challenge is to remain a viable publisher in the face of
disruptive digital technology. The print subscription model has become
problematic and traditional distribution channels, such as bookstores,
are similarly besieged by Internet retail options.
Having just celebrated our 40th anniversary, we are trying to
overcome these obstacles with a major revitalization effort. The most
visible effect of this new infusion of energy is a return to the more
graphic-rich character of our initial years, leading collectors and book
lovers to again covet our printed volumes. We have also refreshed our
website and made our individual articles available for immediate
download, we started a blog, and created an online submission form. We
turned to social media and the Internet as they allow more timely
attention to issues than is possible in a quarterly publication. These
tools also enable us to build a more direct relationship with our
readers and to form alliances with like-minded journals and
organizations. We believe that cooperating in the area of social media
will advance our common publishing objectives, and are grateful to Peace
Review for stimulating a much needed conversation among progressive
scholarly publications.
Gregory Shank *
* Gregory Shank worked on the first issue of Social Justice in 1974
and went on to become the Managing Editor, a position he now shares with
Stefania De Petris. He lives in San Francisco. This article will appear
in the 24th Anniversary issue of Peace Review, which is dedicated to the
state of peace and justice journals. Thanks to Robert Elias for allowing
us to use it here.
