Social Justice after the "Death of the Social"

Abstract

When I wrote my first contribution to justice (then and Social Justice) in 1980, I took meaning of more or less for granted. The article (O'Malley, 1981) dealing with Australian bushrangers and United States train robbers in late 19th century focused on episodes of what Eric Hobsbawm (1969) referred to as social banditry. Social banditry was in sense that it was organically integrated in its community and supported accordingly. The communities concerned were made up of rural laborers and smallholders, who saw in bushrangers and train robbers (sometimes erroneously) an embodiment of their own communal sense of injustice. They saw in bandits men whose primitive rebellion was directed against their shared oppressors: large landholders, banks, railway companies, and police and other law agents who upheld law of rich and powerful. In this way, article linked crime with struggles for social justice, and so it seemed natural to publish it in this journal. Thinking about in such terms, as Left Realist criminologists reminded us (e.g., Kinsey et al., 1986), could generate a romantic image of offending, one shared with much radical criminology of time, and perhaps it occasionally glorified thugs and ignored victims. Yet journal's linking of and justice was not meant to lead us to imagine all manner of lumpen thugs as class heroes, as Left Realists' perspective would suggest. Rather, it was, and still is, concerned inter alia with various connections between and justice. These include: how and predation arise out of brutalization of people suffering injustice (Platt, 1978); ways in which people's resistance to oppression and injustice were legally defined as (Brake, 1983); role of criminal law in reinforcing and defending injustice (Takagi and Platt, 1978), and so on. This sort of approach, at least in my understanding, was why journal was then called Crime and Social Justice. Even though has moved from being main focus of journal, it continues to have a presence on agenda of Social Justice. (For two examples, see The War on Drugs [Vol. 18, No. 4, 1991] and Justice and World System [Vol. 21, No. 4, 1994].) Back in 1980, a key part of significance of journal was that it took a radical stance on crime. The journal and its contributors helped enormously to challenge and rupture traditional political and academic notions of as pathological or evil, of criminal law as natural and good. True, some other, excellent critical criminological journals emerged about same time or a little later, notably Contemporary Crises. Yet distinctive contribution of Crime and Social Justice was that it much more explicitly brought criminology and study of issues in justice. This was by no means norm, especially in more theoretically driven radical criminologies emanating from Britain that were prominent at time. A key aim of Crime and Social Justice was to challenge idea that justice in terms of which was to be understood was justice that law created. It made clear, in times when this needed to be made clear, that and justice could not be divorced from the social, and that therefore neither could be thought of as merely analytical subjects. Both and justice were to be understood from a radical perspective simultaneously as analytic, political, and moral. I think this is a legacy of which Crime and Social Justice and Social Justice together should be proud. In all of this, too, there was a sense that analysis of and justice had to take account of collectivities. Common to times, had a tightly integrated, double character. On one side was a collective civility, a responsibility to all others that we bear as members of an organic whole that is society. …

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