Preface to Punishment and Penal Discipline

years in 1975), and the remaining article by Paul Takagi was originally published in Federal Probation. Though most of the articles share a common Marxist perspective, the authors represent a diversity of interests and backgrounds. This is reflected in the topics covered (history of punishment, rise of the penitentiary, sentencing, psychiatry and rehabilitation, the prisoners ̓movement, etc.) and in the background of the authors (Rusche wrote his pioneering essay in Germany in the 1930s, Jankovic is a Yugoslavian sociologist, Melossi is an Italian Marxist, Russell Hogg is an Australian sociologist studying at the University of Sheffield in England, etc.). With the exception of those who were trained at Berkeleyʼs School of Criminology, the contributors are not so much “criminologists ” as intellectuals who are interested in the “penal question.” Since the publication of the first issue of Crime and Social Justice in 1974, there has been a steady, growing interest in a Marxist analysis of crime and punishment in the United States. Despite the alarming growth of technocratic and reactionary research by the new “realists ” and sociobiologists, we have found also an increasing receptivity, especially among students, prisoners, and younger scholars, to the serious study of Marxism and its application to the field of criminology. The viability of Crime and Social Justice, even after the academic repression of its base at the University of California, Berkeley, is testimony to this interest. This anthology on punishment represents an effort to consolidate what has been accomplished in the last few year