Twenty-Five Years Later: Revisiting the Challenges to Social Justice

When I first started attending meeting of the American Society of Criminology about 10 years ago, I met several people who recounted stories about the Berkeley School of Criminology in the 1960s. As on other occasions, when friends and colleagues slightly older than myself referred back to their experiences in the heyday of the 1960s, these tales made me envious; I felt that I had missed out on something substantial, inspiring. From the perspective of the late 1990s, though, what exactly does it feel like I missed? It hardly makes sense to immerse oneself in nostalgic glorification of another era that cannot be repeated in any event. More to the point of this brief essay, then, is to reflect on directions contemporary criminology has been taking - and could take even further- into the late 1990s and into the beginning of the next century. I will concentrate on three areas of debate, research, and writing where it seems to me either that work needs to be done, or that work already in progress needs to be even further advanced. The first area has to do with resuscitating a tradition of public intellectuality, both in and outside of academic writing per se; the second deals with reconnecting criminology to political economy; and the third with incorporating the study of culture and unconscious social processes into the heart of criminological endeavors. In order to concretize these thoughts, let me focus on a mammoth problem of agreed-upon concern for most left, critical, and feminist criminologists: the growth of incarceration, and its use as a punitive tool, in the United States of the late 1990s. Over the same 25-year period since the Berkeley School ended and Social Justice began, the size of the U.S. incarcerated population has skyrocketed. Since 1980 alone, the number of people in prisons and jails has gone from 500,000 to almost two million. Neither is it any surprise that this population is differentially poor and minority; for whites, the per capita incarceration rate is 350 per 100,000, while for African-Americans the rate rises to 3,250. Equally disturbing is that other advanced industrial nations, from Western European countries to Israel, have been looking to the United States as a model of apparently "successful" approaches to stave off rising crime. During this period, academic criminology has tended to grow in sync with this trend: increases in the number of sociology jobs that seek specializations in criminology and criminal justice have been reported; courses are filled with students who realize that this subject matter is both interesting and potentially yielding of jobs following graduation. Thus, simultaneous with the growth of incarceration over the last 25 years has been an increase in what might be called the academicization of criminology. What seems highly problematic, though, is that the large numbers of sociologists and criminologists in academia have had no discernible effect on altering these punitive incarcerative trends through public debates or vis-a-vis political action. This, then, is one reason for regretting the loss of the Berkeley School as a place where commitment to both intellectual and political engagement - to "praxis" - seemed for a short time to have been institutionalized. Then, more than at present, social movements with which criminologists could ally were vibrant, and far more offensively than defensively oriented. But again, this is the 1990s, not the 1960s or 1970s: what can be done now? For one thing, a stress on the importance of what Russell Jacoby has called "public intellectuality" is exceedingly important: intervening in the media, as Gregg Barak and others have done with "newsmaking criminology," is worthwhile as a matter of course, as is supporting the efforts made at a recent California conference organized by Angela Davis and others, or by the Prison Moratorium Project of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In addition, though, it is important for criminologists to actively study the relationship between academia and the social relations that surround it. …