Reflexive Social Justice

Since its first publication in 1974, Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology and the subsequently titled Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order has been the most significant journal in my academic life. In fact, for the journal's first 18 years, I would faithfully read the issue from cover to cover within a 24-hour period of having received my copy. There is simply no other journal with which I have had such a relationship as the one I have had with Social Justice, always involving a careful, thoughtful, and complete reading of the text. Twenty-five years is a long time to have an intimate relationship in life and text. In terms of this journal's relevancy to my reading of criminology and criminal justice, none other can match it. In many ways, this journal has been one of my primary gauges for gleaning "correct" analyses of crime, control, and justice from a worldwide perspective, grounded in comparative, international, and cultural studies, years before "globalization" or "transnationalization" had become fashionable in popular and scientific circles. Over the years, the journal has also informed much of my epistemological orientation toward theory and practice, and towards ideology, policy, and application. Moreover, though some nonreaders, critical and mainstream, may have concluded wrongly years ago that Social Justice was some kind of dogmatic Marxist publication, narrow in its focus and myopic in its views, this has certainly not turned out to be the case. Although "neo-Marxist," whatever that exactly means today, in its political-economic orientation to crime and social justice, the journal as a radical forum has been open to a variety of postcolonial and postmodern writings that reflect the journal's highly inclusive and integrative approach to crime, conflict, and world order. Lastly, the journal has always helped me define the subject matter of "crime" in broad and yet material terms, including offenses, harms, injuries, human rights, violations, negligences, omissions, etc. Whether the objects of inquiry were labeled early on as "crimes against humanity" or "crimes of imperialism," "crimes of sexism," "crimes of exploitation," or more recently as "state crimes," "environmental crimes," and "transnational crimes," the focus has always been on the big picture of crime and justice, or on telling the most comprehensive (believable) stories of crime and social control. When I reflect on what the journal has meant to me, I cannot ignore the five and one-half years in which I served as the Book Review Editor (1986 to 1991). The consulting with dozens of contributors brought me in contact with many progressive criminologists, inside and outside the U.S., and in turn, this experience helped over the years to facilitate the production of several readers, working with persons locally, nationally, and internationally. In this way, the journal has also influenced and shaped much of my scholarly production and involvement with such disperse topics as housing and homelessness, domestic violence and sexual assault, state crimes, human rights, mass consumption and communication, public policy and social struggle, criminal justice and social justice, welfare reform and community empowerment. In the broader social sense, the uniqueness of Social Justice for 25 years has been its truly "cutting-edge" sensibility to the study of crime and crime control. I believe this is most strongly demonstrated by the journal's focus, as noted above, on the international character of crime, conflict, and world order. Always engaged with the local and the global, the journal has taken pioneering steps in the transnational study of crime and social justice. From its birth, the journal has been concerned with the role of the state in the affairs of the individual and the world, with the various forms and shapes "rights" have taken, and with the developments in law and human rights struggles that have advanced the perceptions and conceptions of the human condition, in terms of peace and justice. …