Julia Schwendinger

Social Class and the Definition of Crime

James Petras (1977) has analyzed bourgeois crimes that destabilized and then destroyed the democratic Chilean government.1 He noted that these crimes were essentially class crimes and hence that no single group or groups acted [alone] to bring Allende down’. By distinguishing the ‘three step flow’ of organizations, events and criminal engagements, preparing the way for the fascist seizure of power, Petras performs a service for radical criminology.2 His article also affirms certain historical generalizations. First, the struggle for socialism is confronted inevitably with counter-revolutionary bourgeois violence. Second, in light of the Chilean experience, reliance on bourgeois legality to defend socialist achievements is suicidal.

Giving Crime Prevention Top Priority

Right-wing policies for diminishing crime, stripping the welfare state, and managing economic crises have paradoxically maintained the causes of crime. But criminologists rarely confront the contradictions behind these policies. Policies that foster entry-level jobs, jobs with multiplier effects, and industrial expansion are required. Drug use should be decriminalized and structural underemployment ameliorated. Undoing damage caused by previous administrations and formulating workable alternatives to law-and-order policies requires bold experimentation and planning by civil organizations and federal bureaus that give top priority to crime prevention.

Rape, the Law, and Private Property:

Historical developments in rape laws argue against the now-popular notion that the law, which originally protected property, continues to protect male property rights. Also, these developments have been strongly influenced by modes of production, but the law cannot be adequately understood by reducing the property relationships in volved simply to the possession of women by men. While this restrict ed use of the term property may be somewhat meaningful when refer ring to slave societies, it is not very useful when dealing with kinship societies, emerging feudal class distinctions, colonial relationships, or personal dependency relations in the modern American home. Ex amples of rape laws in a variety of contemporary and historical social formations are given, and especially noted is the general trend toward recognition of womens legal rights in the United States.

Delinquency and the Collective Varieties of Youth

Taken as a whole, the presentation of material in Delinquency and the Collective Varieties of Youth is organized on varying levels of abstraction. The first half of the manuscript (the very first section of which is reproduced here) contains fairly abstract discussions of causal relationships while the later sections gradually concretize the analysis, focusing on specific times and places. These conjunctures in time and place will be derived from historical literature on delinquency, but they will emphasize the development of delinquent formations in the Los Angeles area of California. We initially gathered the data about these formations by continuous participant observations between 1959 and 1962. In 1963 a preliminary statement about the research was written and further research, now involving a large research project, was begun. This research, which followed up the previous investigation, lasted until 1967.

Sociologists of the Chair and the Natural Law Tradition

A focus on the development of academic sociology in the United States represents one of the interesting trends in the growing body of radical historical writings about the field. 1 An important work in this genre is represented by Dusky Lee Smith’s essay on the founders of American sociology. Smith has noted that major founders such as William Graham Sumner, Lester F. Ward, Franklin Henry Giddings, Edward Allsworth Ross and Ullyses Grant Weatherly, did not subscribe to any of the radical intellectual traditions which were established in the Western World, such as socialism, Marxism and anarchism. Furthermore, with the exception of Sumner who was the &dquo;famous paladin of Social Darwinism, &dquo; these men were in

Looking back: reflecting on the birth of radical criminology at Berkeley

Willem Adrian Bonger was the first criminology professor in the Netherlands and his 1905 doctoral dissertation was entitled Criminality and Economic Conditions. Utilizing Karl Marx’s interpretation of economic conditions, Bonger’s dissertation was unprecedented because it focused on social-class variations in crime among the upper-class crime as well as the working-class crime. If Bonger had been born later and moved to Berkeley, his long hair and systemic approach to crime would have made him feel at home with the radical criminologists in the School of Criminology, UC Berkeley in the 1970s, who favored Marxian interpretations of crime and punishment even though they were stereotyped as ‘extremists’ and ‘utopians.’ In an effort to free the school from its radical influences, Gilbert Geis, for instance, rounded up the usual suspects. The radicals, he declares, were in no small part responsible for the declining state of affairs in the School because of their unwillingness to compromise. Instead, they stubbornly continued to make ‘themselves highly visible and, from the viewpoint of the university administration, embarrassingly unpopular not only with it, but also with the local law enforcement establishment.’ ‘They also offended California’s Governor, Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese III, then the governor’s legal affairs secretary, on the school’s advisory council.’ Consequently, in Geis’ opinion, the radicals’ stubborn willfulness should also be blamed because these emotionally charged individuals were unwilling to stay in the closet and discontinue their ‘highly publicized acts of political protest.’ But it is simply impossible to understand the Berkeley radicals without realizing that social and political movements – antiwar, civil rights, feminism – had pulled them together despite their diverse positions and professional interests. They included feminists, social democrats, Maoists, anarchists, left-liberals, moderate liberals, Marxists and people with no distinct political perspective. They certainly included people whose utopian dreams at that time made life bearable but they also included pragmatists. Although they formed professionally oriented task groups to sponsor a conference on prisons, launch a criminology journal and wrote textbooks or model legislation and although one could find them drinking beer and dancing at an Irish Pub, The Star and The Plough, their networks expanded or contracted depending upon what was happening outside the School. They joined social and political movements in the San Francisco Bay Area and, until the School itself was in peril, most of their activities were composed of short-term – often reactive and spontaneous – responses to events outside the school.

Reviews: J.S. Mill And The Subjection Of Women

background of Mill’s work, have had mixed feelings about the Subjection of Women (e. g. , Brownmiller, 1971; Rossi, 1970; Carr, 1970). On the one hand, it is seen as a positive contribution to women’s movements; as providing an expose of male selfishness and love of power; and is an expression of basic libertarian values which are pertinent to contemporary women’s struggles for equality. On the other hand, it is regarded as a work