THE SOCIAL LOCATION OF JUSTICE IN AMERICA

T. R. Young

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION. In this Lecture I want to discuss and diagram the location of justice in American society in the 1980's. For a comprehensive theory of crime and justice, there is a need to identify all of the various systems by which behavior is monitored and punished, a need to locate each system in the larger social order, a need to compare the basic differences between all systems in terms of the kind of delict policed, the demographic characteristics of the policed and the police, the kind of punishment which informs each system as well as the differences in treatment of those subjected to the policing process.

Beyond this kind of information, it is necessary to have trend data within a given social formation, comparative data between high-crime and low-crime societies as well as data about which policies work well to constitute a good and decent society in which people can lead productive and cooperative lives. This Lecture presents some of the foundational analysis toward a more complete criminology/social control theory than is now available: one which transcends the political and ideological needs of those who benefit from and those who operate the present system. Indeed, a just society, in the substantive meaning of justice, requires a far more comprehensive understanding of crime and justice than is possible by the exclusive focus upon the criminal justice system as the "proper" province for the study of crime and deviancy.

SYSTEMS OF JUSTICE: There are at least eight major justice systems oriented to the ordering and sanctioning of human behavior in place in the United States. The eight include:

1) the criminal justice system,

2) the Military Justice system,

3) the Administrative Regulatory Agencies of the Federal State, and Local governments,

4) the Peer Review system for professionals,

5) the Private Security system which monitors employees, customers, and competitors,

6) the Religious system which monitors and sanctions communicants of a religious order,

7) the Medical system which judges and controls the behavior of those who are said to be ill rather than criminal, and

8) the Social Welfare system which monitors and controls the behavior of those to whom transfer payments are made...usually the poor but sometimes others.

A Civil Justice system exists side by side but this system is a bit different in that it offers the citizen direct access to law and, if used wisely can empower the individual as against the state, the corporation and those who are otherwise insulated from the effects of law, order and justice.

The Civil Justice system is the location of much of the class struggle suppressed in politics, work, art, science, and cinema.  As juries give ever-increasing awards to persons injured by major corporations, there arises great effort among servants of big capital to limit civil suits and to limit damage awards to 'reasonable' amounts.  At the same time, there is little interest in the Congress or in Corporate life to reasonable levels pollution of toxic wastes; to limit profits to reasonal levels; to limit work place dangers to reasonable dimesions or to limit financing of candidates to reasonable amounts.  Reason become captive to both law and justice; finding what little room to range within the margins of civil damage suits.

There are other control systems mentioned later which are not the focus here. They are very important but do not have the writ of state or church directly behind them--although they often have moral support of church and state.

INFORMAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS such as the K.K.K., and the Jewish Defense League or the political underground are omitted here. The 22 secret agencies of the Federal government engage in punitive action as do the various military services. The F.B.I., for example, has had a secret mission to control political dissent. F.B.I. informant Frank Varelli says he wrote a report on Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (Dem., Colo.) listing her 'terrorist" affiliation as "Sandinista--marxist-Leninist." Others listed included Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, Sen. Christopher Dodd, Sen. Ted Kennedy and several others (USA Today, 17 Mar., 87). The forms of political crime by public and private agencies also need analysis in order to complete the study of social control and to examine the character of justice but these are treated in another paper (Young, 1985). Private policing systems such as the various 'militia' groups which oppose the reach of the state into patriarchy, racist privilege or religious bigotry. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City grew out of the resistance of private groups to the role of the state in dismantling patriarchy, ethnic prerogatives, religious bigotry and the monopoly of the state in the use of force. ¹

All of these control systems have as their objective the establishment of a framework to identify, to judge and to repress some forms of behavior within a given social philosophy of justice. In order to think about social control, we must first think about the concept of justice.

The Concept of Justice: One should note that, in modern law, justice simply means the rational application of specific rules to human behavior. As with all systems of instrumental rationality, the rules, policies, laws, or goals used as the basis for rational derivations may be most unfair. Here justice, as a concept, is restricted to the validity of the deductions, not the fairness of the principles. In these usage, a judgment is said to be fair when the decision may be "justified" by its lawful, i.e., rational derivation from the abstract principles set forth in a code of conduct.

One should note that there is a transcendental meaning of the concept of justice in which the rules, laws, policies or goals themselves are brought into question. This latter rationality is the province of politics rather than of the administrative agencies which constitute the justice systems.

Postmodern criminologists, in company with a great many theologians, want first of all to talk about larger questions of justice, equity, and legitimacy in terms of some over-arching set of human rights and human responsibilities.

As used here, a "justice system," is an established social process by which a set of formal rules are constituted and enforced. A justice system claims for itself the right to receive complaints about violations, to examine the behavior of persons or organizations, and to judge the merits of those complaints. In addition, negative sanctions are available along with the social power to penalize violators. A justice system is composed of judges, accusers, defendants, warders and a community in which these legitimately operate. In most justice systems, there is a set of principles which must be applied such that a rational derivation must be shown to exist between the abstract principle(s) and the concrete adjudication. There are also procedures to which the accused is entitled and judges need must follow.

In addition to the systems of justice ordinarily conceived to be involved in social control here, there is also a social justice system which tacitly recognizes the harm done to people by the existing structure of social relations and economic processes and makes some effort to redress that harm by allocating public resources to those so harmed. (See Appendix B.) The state welfare system: social security, unemployment compensation, V.A. benefits, food stamps, aid to dependent children, hot lunch programs, Medicaid and Medicare, housing subsidies, loans and grants to college students as well as to farmers, small businesses and others comprise the social justice system.

In this system, the entire approach to social control changes from retributive justice to distributive justice. As mean­spirited, cheap-sided and degrading as it often is, the state welfare system in the U.S. transcends the thin rationality of the other justice systems and embodies the principle of mercy rather than justice. A fully developed social justice system stands as an alternative to the workings of the various systems informed by social conflict and punitive social control systems. Such a system of justice would be founded upon a theory of human rights rather than mere repression (Young, 1983).

THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN SOCIETY: The basic diagrams will place each major justice system in its proximate location in the social order. Since the social order is so complex, I will simplify it into: a) the class system, b) the gender system, c) the racial system and d) the political economy of the U.S. as James F. O'Connor (1973) has mapped it. We will provide five charts showing the location of crime and justice in two or more of these social structures.

Most people are familiar with the structures of class, racial privilege and gender divisions but some will not be familiar with the work of O'Connor. Some explanation of the organization of the political economy in which justice is instituted is necessary for a marxist theory of justice since mode of production is the foundational concept in marxian theory. We posit that the forms of crime and justice varies with mode of production. That proposition is more fully developed in an earlier Lecture (Young: 1986).

O'Connor divides the economy into three functional sectors: the monopoly sector is comprised of firms which share a given line of production among relatively few (20 or so) companies. Wages, fringe benefits, pensions and job security is excellent, working conditions are good, equal opportunity and due process are often part of company policy. There are some 2 million such firms including multinationals (MNCs). About 300 firms dominate the economy and produce about 2/3 of the gross national product. It employs about 1/3 of the workforce.

The competitive sector is made up of small firms. In this sector, there is competition between firms for share of market with price, quality, and quantity elements in the competition. Job security is weak, wages are poor, fringe benefits few, and working conditions highly variable. The local businesses whose owners live in the community, are well known and accessible to customers and workers alike.

The third sector is the state sector comprised of all government agencies at the federal, state and local level. Working conditions are generally good to excellent, job security excellent, due process available, pensions good to generous and other fringe benefits which help the worker in the event of need. Of the 110 million in the work force, some 20 million or so work as police, public school teachers, mail deliverers, social workers, clerks, public utilities, and other government agencies.

In addition to the structure of the political economy of the United States, class position, gender, and ethnic origin all constitute important parts of the social order which affect the kinds of crime one is likely to commit and the kinds of justice to which one is likely to be subjected. Generally, the better the position in the class structure, the better the opportunity for high-yield crime, low risk crime and for distributive forms of the unlikely event one is found out. The same is true for race. Indeed, as we will learn, race and class combine to program people in or out of the various social control agencies. Gender has a curious and complex effect on crime and justice which we will try to sort out for the reader in sensible ways. Let us now look at the location of crime and justice in this very complex social order.

II. THE SOCIAL LOCATION OF CRIME AND JUSTICE. In the United States, as in all advanced capitalist societies, a wide variety of justice systems exist side by side. Different crimes and different criminal sectors of the population are processed through each system of justice. The outcomes of each system of justice are very different one from another. The rules of evidence, the standing of the offender, the orientations of the jurors vis a vis the offender, the purposes of the adjudication all are far different one from another. (see Appendix A for a side by side comparison of the major justice system on a number of variables).

A. THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. (C.J.S.). The C.J.S. is comprised of police, prisoners, lawyers, judges, wardens, and probation officers as well as a wide array of auxiliary personnel such as teachers, psychologists, doctors, parole boards and social workers. It deals with what is commonly called street crime. Street crime is defined as the pretheoretical reunification of production and distribution. It is pretheoretical resistance and rebellion to the extent that the criminal does not identify the source of misery, squalor, compulsion or anger which fuels his/her behavior but rather strikes out at others similarly located in the social structure as a means to adapt to the social conditions of that stratum. One can make an argument that riots and looting are, to some degree theoretically informed in that the class enemy is correctly identified. Riots have produced much in the way of progressive legislation in the 60's (Griffen et. al.: 1983; Isaac and Kelly: 1981). Looting is aimed primarily at the nonresident stores and shops in the Ghetto.

Street crime includes robbery, burglary, auto theft, arson, and other property crime as well as crimes against the person: rape, assault, kidnapping and murder. The C.J.S. also processes those in the lower echelons of organized crime: prostitutes, pimps, drug pushers, the numbers runners, and others in illicit goods and services. Seldom are those who commit white collar crime, corporate crime and still less those who commit most political crime policed by the C.J.S.

In the first Diagram, one can see the approximate location of the different forms of crime as well as a visual presentation of O'Connor's tripartite model of the economic system. Most street crime is located among the poor. There is a spurious relationship between crime and race which disappears when one controls for class position. Most street crime is committed against smaller business as well as against members of the working poor or those in the surplus population.

Crime against small business is, in some part, responsible for the policing preferences of the state for the control of street crime in that small business constitute the political base of the state sector. The harm done to the social fabric by corporate crime is much greater (Appendix A), but since most politicians come out of the petty bourgeois and from the professional and managerial strata which has close social ties with small business, the police capacity of the state is directed with the greatest animus against small time criminals.

The primary focus of the C.J.S. is the social junk of America: those who have been pushed out of the occupational tracks or who have pulled themselves out but yet are too proud to live on charity, too greedy to take minimal wages, too assertive to be docile and too individualistic to much care about the people they hurt.

The targets of the C.J.S. are usually young, male and poor. A complex set of factors tend to increase the probabilities that young people, engaged in productive labor in other societies, would engage in pretheoretical rebellion and resistance. They grow up in a culture of violence, of individualism, of false needs, of predatory economics and have a recruiting network of lower level functionaries from organized crime to enlist them in an ever-increasing series of scams, thefts, burglaries, extortions, drug dealing and general predation. At the same time, the disemployment rates for young people daily increase.

As Eitzen notes from the literature (1985: 134 et passim), there are three economic variables which are associated with street crime: disemployment, poverty and inequality. It is not that poverty, unemployment and inequality produce crime...it is when these are combined with the conditions above, especially false needs (see below), individualism, and the American culture of violence associated with male dominance of women and competitors that crime rates skyrocket. Poor people don't commit crime when there is community rather than individualism...they share. The poor in China, Japan, or the Muslim societies seldom rob, rape or swindle each other. It is poverty without the community produced by religion or by social justice which fuels street crime. Of the democratic and capitalist countries, the U.S. has the greatest inequality, the highest crime rates, the most individualism and the shabbiest welfare programs (see below).

The alternatives for disemployed young males are far below the life style set by the advertizing industry and American values as that of the good life. They could sell their labor power for menial wages in the competitive sector. They could parasitize on their families. They could rely on private charity or they could try to enroll in one of the welfare programs which redistribute wealth. Most try some combination of all of the above at one time or another in their career. Many add crime to their inventory of adjustive mechanisms in the predatory world in which they live.

There are two competing perspectives with which to understand the genesis of street crime. Tony Platt has said that street crime increases as capitalism marginalizes (disemploys and immiserates) people (1978: 30). In this perspective, those who live in an advanced capitalist society may resort to street crime when their objective social location limits their access to the goods and services available to those who occupy a more favored location in the social order. A second view is that street crime arise out of the personality dynamics of individuals and has little to do with the ordinary, everyday social conditions in which street criminals find themselves.

In the radical analysis, the best policy is to change the social organization. This means improving the structure of social justice rather than the structure of criminal justice (Young: 1985a) We will return to this point in the final section of the Lecture.

The conservative view argues that the individual should be changed or kept in confinement until it is able to fit into society without forcibly reunifying productive and distribution. The Reagan administration takes the latter view, as indeed do most people, and is expanding the C.J.S. An F.B.I. report (USA Today: 17 mar. 87) predicts more crime and more violence into the 1990's. A judge in Santa Clara sentenced five county supervisors to ten days in jail for violating a court order to provide 96 more cells in the county jail. There is a building boom in jails and prisons across America. The use of the C.J.S. creates an ever-expanding cycle of convicts in and out of society.

Expanding the Criminal Justice System. The policies of a capitalist state, even democratic state, taken together create an emerging police state centered around the C.J.S.: easier rules of search and seizure, longer and easier detention for those not yet tried, tougher sentencing, fewer courtroom protections, closer supervision of probation all bespeak a vast "Gulag" for poor and minority males in the U.S. The effect of these policies serve to strengthen the capacity of the criminal justice system to police the 'free entrepreneurs' of crime. as we shall see later, the policies of the Reagan administration also serve to dismantle the social control agencies of the rich and powerful.

High Tech Control Industry. The National Institute of Justice (N.I.J.) reports a growing use of electronic devices which enable a central computer to monitor people on probation and parole. Florida appears to lead the way in this high tech social control effort. Persons found guilty of a crime are offered a form of house arrest in which they agree to the placement of an unremovable electronic device which is monitored by a second device linked to the police department computer. Whenever a person wearing such a device strays beyond the 100 foot radius of the system, it is recorded on the police computer and constitutes violation of probation. Such electronics cost far less to use than incarceration of a person in a prison ward. This technology, in the same moment greatly increase the space available for holding and monitoring those too poor to engage in low risk crime or too poor to escape the criminal justice system.

At the same time, high tech is used to monitor shoppers and bank customers, to analyze urine of government and private industry employees, to detect lies and habits of employees, to test them for purposes of motivation, loyalty, and probity. The computerized cash register with the familiar black strip codings was adopted more to control white collar crime than for purposes of inventory or accuracy. K-mart managers found that the system paid for itself very quickly by discouraging clerks from ringing up pennies rather than dollars for friends and family (Young: 1987). The personnel of crime control is changing from the tough Irish cop who barely finished high school to the professional technician of the high tech industry trained to its work in the university system...itself everyday more oriented to the technical needs of control in managed societies than to its critique.

THE CLASS, GENDER, AND RACIAL LOCATION OF C.J.S. POLICING: However, after being caught and tried with the aid of high science, the treatment of persons processed in the C.J.S. continues to be nasty, brutal and pro forma. Some persons are sentenced in less than a minute for some offenses. Compared to the legal resources available to I.B.M. or Ford Motor Company, these people get the barest minimum of legal rights. If there are 25,000 street murders per year and if over a million are equally dead as a result of corporate crime, cruel and unusual punishment is the norm.

The 1984 report of N.I.J. said that the Criminal Justice System is under "tremendous stress." The prison population has grown about 50% in the past 10 years. The Federal and State government in the U.S. is under pressure to greatly expand this part of the system of justice.

Diagram II sets forth the class location of those who are policed by the C.J.S. It captures poor people (the median before arrest income of inmates was less than $3,000), mostly males (96% of the people in prison are male) and minorities in far larger proportion that in the population at large. Two thirds of the people in prison are under 30 years of age. 60% did not finish high school. Blacks are four times as likely to be found in prison than are whites (Flanagan et.al. 1982) The justice system as a whole in the U.S. acts as a great filter­­catching the poor and letting the rich go free. It funnels the poor into prison and diverts white, middle class professionals, managers and owners back into society (Reiman, 1984).

Some 700,000 persons are in prisons and jails in the U.S. today. This number does not include those juveniles held in group homes, work camps, nor does it count all those who are referred to the military instead of jail. About 1,300,000 are on probation, according to the National Institute of Justice Report of March, 1985.

POLICING WOMEN. Diagram III summarizes the policing practices against women in America today. Generally women are exempted from processing through the C.J.S. The labor of women as the unpaid reproducers of labor or unpaid domestic servants of working males or as unpaid volunteers in the community is far too important to the economy to send them to jail. Young men aren't assigned the task of raising children, teaching them the protocols of disciplined work as well as the amenities of civilized conduct nor are young men expected to clean house, wash clothes, prepare meals, or chauffeur others. It is no great loss to the economy for young men who are surplus to the productive process to go to jail but young women are to get married, reproduce the next generation of laborers, do the volunteer work in school, church, and charity while content in their homelife. Ivan Illich (1982) calls this unpaid but necessary labor, 'shadow work' in his excellent treatise on the economics of gender.

Women of the middle classes are expected to subsidize the economy with their unpaid labor at home and in the community. Not only must they rear the next generation of compliant managers and technicians as well as the motivated business person, but they must also do the thousand and one volunteer tasks that every community needs done but which cannot be funded adequately in the political economy of the capitalism system. As we shall see, the medical justice system maintains them in this alienated social life world. The unpaid labor of women at home and in the community is indispensable to any society (Illich, 1982).

At minimum wages, women doing 40 hours of shadow work per week in the 84 million American households amounts to 585,312,000,000 dollars. If women work only 20 hours a week on shadow work at home and in the community, the subsidy to the economy is half that. Either sum is an indispensable subsidy to the economy. If they were paid the social wage they deserve, the profits of the economy would be absorbed. The lesson here is that no economic system is profitable...all create a net loss to the environment in which they exist. Capitalism can claim a profit only if it transfers some of its costs to workers, to women, to the third world, to the environment or to the future.

Davis and Faith (1985) stress that some women are far more likely to be policed than their male counterparts. Disobedient or runaway adolescent females, those who are sexually active or pregnant in violation of husband's or father's wishes, and the 'unfit' mother are far more likely to be policed and institutionalized than disobedient, runaway, sexually promiscuous, or abusive fathers (p. 5).

Over time, the trend has been a shift from the extended family and the church as the unit of social control of women to the husband and the C.J.S. in the industrial phase of capitalism. Now we see another monumental shift in the sociology of social control of women to the market, the welfare agencies of the state and, as usual the dominant male in her life. Davis and Faith (1985: 20) have worked out an excellent schematic of trends in that technology. Davis and Anderson (1983) report a shift from total institutions as a control locus of women to the increased use of decentralized, community-based structures which include welfare, community mental health, food stamp programs, social security, medicaid, and other state welfare programs. Hutter and Williams (1981) point to the two-tiered system of social control for women in which middle and upper class women receive decentralized, privatized services, while poor and third world women are controlled by the centralized agencies of the state.

For those women who do perform shadow work, there are two other policing systems at work to maintain them in the alienated role of housewife. The welfare system provides the single mother in poverty with the basic necessities of life but, in avaricious jealousy, the middle class and the working class insists upon the degradations of home espionage. Thousands of young social workers, in the prime of their morality, undertake to staff the welfare system, find that they are little more than state spies and warders then quickly burnout and leave for better places in which to act on that morality.

Most of the women in prison are there for economic crimes: prostitution, writing bad checks or shoplifting. Most of the women supervised by the medical justice system are there for depression and anxiety. Most of the Blacks in the C.J.S. are their for crimes against property or for involvement in vice.

POLICING BLACKS. Diagram IV suggests that Blacks are the most heavily policed group in American society. Stores and shops in Black communities use the private security system to police customers and clerks alike. Poor Black single mothers are policed by the welfare worker. Poor single Black women are policed by the C.J.S. as are the young single Black male. The role of religion in policing is discussed later on but it too polices its Black communicants.

Young black males are the most heavily policed sector of the U.S. population. As the diagram indicates, 9 of 10 black males will be processed through some part of the C.J.S. It is not that Blacks are more criminal than are whites. This point must be made very clear. When the relationship between race and class position is controlled, the relationship between crime and race disappears. Braithwaite (1979) has reported that the increase in street crime varies with inequality. The U.S. cities with the greatest income inequality consistently show the highest crime rates. This holds true regardless of city size, geographic region or racial percentages.

Young poor black males do not commit more crime than do poor young white males...it is just that there are far more black families in poverty than are there white families. Middle class Blacks do not commit more crime than do middle class whites. Blacks do commit far less corporate crime than do Whites not because white corporate officers are, genetically, prone to criminal behavior, more so than Blacks nor are corporate officers less civilized. The noninvolvement of Blacks in corporate crime is better explained by the fact than they are not in that class stratum. There are fewer Blacks in the top echelons of corporations. When Blacks or women do reach the top of the corporate echelon, you can be sure they will commit corporate crime...not because they are black but because the demand for profit will mandate it. It is not race, but rather racism which creates the correlations which racists pounce upon to justify even more exclusionary and punitive public policies.

While it is easy to say that Blacks are policed by the more cruel and vindictive C.J.S. because of discrimination, the prior question is from where does that discrimination come. The more conservative understanding is that Blacks are inferior, more primitive in their racial heritage and thus, prone to commit crime and needful of more restrictive policing and imprisonment than their more civilized white cousins. The radical analysis is quite different. A better analysis for explaining the preponderance of young Blacks in street crime or in prison is that young black males are far more likely to be unemployed than are white males. The relationship between unemployment and street crime is clear (Brenner, 1976; Berk, Lenihan and Rossi, 1980).

In the radical analysis, racial animosity arises from conflict over employment opportunities. When jobs are plentiful, racial harmony tends to be the rule. When jobs are scarce, people fight over them. In America, most of the policing agencies are staffed and administered by whites and whites use to power of the state to keep the job preference for their friends and family. Since it is in the interest of profits to keep labor costs down, there is a continuing struggle over the jobs remaining in any capitalist system. The sources of racism are to be found there.

Slavery was not problematic to Northern textile owners and workers until slave-owners in the South entered into textile production and undercut prices in the free market. Racial animosity became serious in the South when poor whites found they had to compete with poor free Blacks after the Civil War. Racial animosity continued as the Irish and other European migrants had to compete with cheaper Black labor in the steel mills of Gary, the meat packing plants of Chicago or the automobile factories of Detroit. Corporate executives sent recruiting crews to the South to recruit cheap black labor in order to break strikes and to 'improve' cost-profit ratios. White workers did not appreciate black workers breaking strikes or taking jobs away in the 1910's, 20's and 30's.

Racial animosity declined in WWII as white males went to war leaving a labor shortage in the factories and plants back home. Racial harmony improved through the good years of American capitalism after WWII when America had the world markets to itself and the economy boomed. With the loss of markets in the world capitalist system since the mid-seventies, disemployment has increased and, once again, an ugly racist policing practice returns as both the C.J.S., the American Nazi Party and the K.K.K. join in an uncoordinated effort to exclude Blacks from jobs and from the social life of America. Both the KKK and the American Nazi party recruit from that stratum in which competition for jobs with Blacks is the most severe. Both recruit from the strata hit hardest by the current recession. Both advocate a populism and a animosity toward big business and big government. Both exclude Blacks from their sense of community (Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, 1987)

The Reagan administration feeds into this renewal of racism by cutting back programs of social justice, most of which help women, minorities, and the poor. At the same time, the Reagan administration, as are the several states, invests more resources in the system which controls poor Blacks while it dismantles the systems of social control of the rich. Just as there is a crisis in social control of women involving the revocation of state support and the reconfirmation of the state, under Reagan, as the enemy of women (Davis and faith, 1985: 18), there is a similar crisis in the control of disemployed Blacks. The solution used by the Reagan administration is more police and more prisons for Blacks. For women, the Reagan administration urges a return to basic family values by which is meant that women should do shadow work as jobs become scarce rather than compete with white males for those jobs.

B. THE MILITARY JUSTICE SYSTEM: A separate sub­section of the Criminal Justice System is the Military Justice System. Informed by the Unified Code of Military Justice (Revised), it processes mostly enlisted personnel. Its prisons are filled with Blacks and Chicanos for the most part. Most of its procedures are swift and it gives scant attention to rules of evidence, due process, right to competent counsel or other constitutional guarantees. The military services take in the worse elements of the social junk cast off by modern industrialized societies, does a fair job rehabilitating some, discharges many and gives short shrift to the few it can't handle.

The kinds of crime monitored by the various military police are crimes against the public order: drinking, brawling, harassing, and destruction of private property in that brawling. Crimes against military order are also policed. Disrespect, a.w.o.l., desertion, drug abuse, homosexuality, assault and failure to obey orders are the meat and potatoes of military justice.

Again it is the young males in poverty who see the military as a viable alternative to the squalor of street life who are policed. The sons and daughters of the middle classes go to college while the sons and daughters of the working class go into the military. There most of them make a good adjustment and some of them get a good technical education. But many of them express their anger at life in pretheoretical modes. Blacks especially, with inchoate anger at the rampant discrimination in the military, strike back with what primitive weapons and primitive theory they have. Petty acts of vandalism, of insolence, of assault against white soldiers and drug use all challenge the logics of a military order.

The larger task of the military in the world capitalist system accounts, in part, for the pretheoretical rebellion of the rank and file. Were the practices and policies of the military actually pointed toward social justice in the world capitalist system, it would be able to engage the loyalties of most soldiers. But the real task of the U.S. military is to be the tough cop of the multinational corporate structure. There are about 3000 MNC's which create the world capitalist system in its modern form with some 300 of the biggest based in the U.S. Policing resistance and rebellion in the third world, comprised mostly of racial minorities does not resonate with the rhetoric of freedom and democracy which lured the young man into the military. They often rebel. In Vietnam, the rebellion was endemic

C. THE ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM: (A.J.S.) In Diagram V, we can note that there is an Administrative Justice System (A.J.S.) which polices corporate crime in the competitive and "monopoly" sectors of the economy. The administrative justice system includes the Labor Relations Board, the F.A.A, the F.T.C., the I.R.S., E.E.O.C., O.S.H.A., F.D.A., S.E.C., E.P.A. and a hundred other state, federal and local agencies. The G.A.O. policies the agencies of the government, not including the C.I.A. Instead of police and weapons as the technology of social control, the A.J.S. employs lawyers, accountants, economists and other highly skilled functionaries (King, 1985: 3).

(Diagram V about here)

Corporate crime is defined as those activities of private corporations qua corporations which harm its employees, customers, competitors, the environment or the collective good in its pursuit of profit. Reiman (1984: 86) reports that corporate crime costs consumers about 200 billion dollars a year with price fixing alone bringing in 60 billion. Corporate policies and practices produce over 300,000 deaths per year with work related deaths about 38,000 (p.55) and air pollution killing more than 142,000 victims per year (p. 67). The tobacco industry spends over two billion dollars a year to help some 500,000 die of tobacco related illness.

For such offenses, criminal prosecution is not the way in which the federal government disposes of corporate crime. King (1985:15) reports that of 2230 cases filed or completed in 1975-76, only 72 or 4% were processed by the C.J.S. She notes that 26.2% of the cases handled by federal agencies were 'serious' offenses but were accorded non-criminal action (p.16). There were 1228 offenses which had physical impact which did not go to the C.J.S. (p.18). Over half of the cases which did go to the C.J.S. took 8 or more years to complete. In the case of corporate crime, justice delayed is justice purchased.

Most of the harm done by corporate crime is not labeled as crime and still less is policed. A G.A.O. report to Congress estimates that the federal government loses billions in taxes because corporations fail to report interest or dividends or fail to file tax returns. The I.R.S. does not check corporate returns against bank and brokerage reports as it does for individuals (USA Today, 17 Mar., '87). When corporate crime policed it is policed gently and politely. Negative sanctions are used but are so small as a ratio of the gross product of the corporations that they constitute little more than a license to steal. Again, corporate crime is the most serious of all forms of crime with the less effort made by the state to control it. For this crime, as Eitzen and Timmer note (p. 311), all the corporate criminals in all of the history of the U.S. have spent a total of less than 2 years in prison. One can get two years for shoplifting in most states.

Corporate crime statistics are not kept by the F.B.I. nor are corporate crimes widely publicized in the media. The law making, the law enforcing, the law reporting, and the law punishing systems in the U.S. are bent by law makers at the county, state and federal levels to protect the corporation and, indirectly, the owners and managers who profit from them. That campaign contributions depend upon the largesse of those who might otherwise be the target of law-making and law enforcement is not well recorded in either public or academic spheres. The knowledge process is severely distorted by such failures.

Corporate crime is fueled by a number of conditions all of which are related to capitalist relations. The American Capitalism System must support the life style of both the super-rich, the very rich and the upper middle class. It is the lower middle class and small businesses which must fund industrial growth, must provide decent wages for workers, must clean up its own pollution, must pay for the policing of the world capitalist system, must compete with capitalists in the Pacific rim countries who pay their workers miserly wages, and must deal with the ever emerging supplier cartels in the third world which try to 'improve' prices. In addition, the economic system must maintain the social welfare system else it lose legitimacy with the voting mass.

Given all these demands on the capitalist system, and given a declining profit rate, it is small wonder that corporations violate labor relations laws, environmental protection laws, consumer protection laws, tax laws, and the laws of the third world countries in which they operate. In the modern world of finance, if a corporation cannot maintain its profit structure, the thousands of mutual fund managers and foreign investors will move their funds electronically to those corporations which will, one way or another, show a profit. It is the job of the A.J.S. to police the profit seeking corporation.

In the A.J.S., a federal or state agency monitors the behavior of a corporation or receives complaints. The agency investigates, charges, prosecutes and penalizes the corporation. Charged with the enforcement of labor laws, occupational safety laws, consumer protection laws, tax laws, banking and stock exchange laws, and environmental protection laws, the A.J.S. represents, putatively, the collective interests of all segments of society. The A.J.S. is an accretion of all the laws emerging from social protest movements in the past 100 years which had, as their objective, the control of the worst excesses of business.

Dismantling the A.J.S.: The Reagan administration has made sustained efforts to weaken or dismantle the A.J.S. and the social welfare system at the same time it tries to strengthen the C.J.S. During the Reagan years, the Antitrust Division of the Justice department has dropped cases against corporations in the monopoly sector, deregulated several industries, appointed friendly Chairs to head those agencies and cut back on funds to enforce the remaining laws.

In this parallel effort can be seen the class bias of the Reagan team. It strengthens the police capacity of the C.J.S. while it subverts the police capacity of the A.J.S. From the point of view of the capitalist economy in economic crisis competing with other national economies for markets in the Third World, this effort is most reasonable even if justice suffers.

D. THE CIVIL JUSTICE (TORT) SYSTEM (C.T.S.): The civil justice system deals with wrongs (torts) instead of crimes. The nicety of this distinction often escapes one since people are equally dead, equally injured, equally robbed with contracts and with agreements as with more direct methods of harm. The C.T.S. subsumes such diverse cases as complaints about the neighbor's dog barking in the night to multimillion dollar suits about wrongful death by malpractice. People sue each other over the estate of the deceased; over the defective merchandize, over discrimination on the job, over property claims in divorce cases, over toxic waste disposal...over things it is hard to imagine. One person sued his parents for failing to provide good care to him as a child. Another person sued her church for excluding her from services. When the relatives of the Black Panthers slain by the Chicago police found they could not get justice in the C.J.S., they filed civil suit and were awarded several millions in damages from the city of Chicago.

The C.T.S. usually operates on the logics of distributive justice. Ordinarily, one finds that one has been injured by some action of a party to which one has given trust. Tort law enables one to obtain legal relief through a civil suit. The deliberations in the suit are oriented to a restoration of the conditions which existed before the wrong was done rather than a punishment of the wrong-doer although the law provides for punitive monetary award in the event of egregious harm. The defendant may be required to pay actual damages as well as punitive damages.

Most of the C.T.S. cases hinge around insurance claims. According to a study by the C.V. Starr Center of Applied Economics at New York University, the C.T.S. administration costs alone amount to between 15 and 20 billions annually. These costs include fees paid to attorneys and expert witnesses, court costs for judges, bailiffs and stenographers, productivity forgone by juries, witnesses and plaintiffs while away from their jobs, and expenses incurred in the adjustment and processing of claims. The study estimates the costs to increase to 38 billion dollars by 1990. (USA Today, 26 Mar., 1987:7b).

Last year more than 30 states enacted changes in tort law. These changes were stimulated by the increase in insurance rates which doubled and redoubled as civil suits became a national pastime. Some states capped the amount of non-economic damages to around 500,000 dollars, some abolished joint liability wherein a defendant had to pay the full amount for partial responsibility, some required structured settlements with periodic payments and some imposed penalties for frivolous suits.

The American International Group of Insurance Companies (AIG), wants still more limitations on civil suits. They want to exclude all 'unintentional' wrongdoing which, as noted earlier, effectively excludes liability for corporate crime since corporations cannot intend...they are not creatures with the psychological capacity to intend...only humans can intend. These companies also want to limit the fees collected by attorneys, to limit the rewards they have to pay out, to requires courts to consider other payments plaintiffs might have received.

There is considerable merit to a system of justice which decentralizes the effort to provide distributive justice and which empowers the individual to take legal action against the largest and richest corporations, against those with high social standing, against those whose political connections reach into the office of the president or the governor. However, in a society marked by conflict relations, the number of such wrongs continue to increase and the costs of repairing those wrongs through the C.T.S. will also increase.

The solution to the upward cycle of costs in the C.T.S. is, for the capitalist system, to increase insurance costs and to decrease insurance awards. The radical solution is to eliminate the conflict relations which, in the first place, lead doctors, brokers, companies and others to wrong their clients. This means to eliminate profit as the motive for provision of health care, of legal service, of goods and services. As long as profit mediates the production and distribution of essential goods and services, those providing them will cut corners and those to whom harm has been done will seek remedy. The C.T.S. provides some remedy when the criminal justice system will not.


E. THE PRIVATE JUSTICE SYSTEM. Just as the corporate world tries to evade the spirit and letter of the law which informs the A.J.S., the corporate world constructs a private police force to serve its private goals in policing and in social control. The Private Justice System (PJS) is large and growing. There are about 870,000 police who staff the C.J.S. but there are over a million private security officers (Eitzen and Timmer: 530). The P.J.S. is owned and operated by private corporations which hire or lease security services. The P.J.S. polices employees, customers and, often, competitors. It uses electronic technology to monitor workers and customers and recruits industrial spies to steal from other companies. The big four in private security are Pinkerton's, Burns, Walter Kidde and Co., and the Wackenhut corporation. Their revenues doubled and redoubled between 1963 and 1975 (Klare, 1975).

Most of the private security is found in the monopoly sector since that's where the most business is located. Ward's, Penney's, K Mart, Walmart, Sears, Target, G.M., Dupont, T.R.W., Lockheed, Chase Manhattan, Hyatt Regency, Hilton, and other giants of the monopoly sector must police workers, customers, competitors and sometimes the agencies of the state itself. Most colleges and universities have private or semi-public police or both. Often the Dean of Student's office is little more than social control agency. The Student loan office at John's Hopkins University kept secret files on student demonstrators until the same students protested (USA Today, 17 Mar., '87).

In the small business sector, owners are present and the work force small enough to be watched daily and hourly. And in most small businesses, owners know and trust workers. There is a personal relationship in small business which encompasses a human concern for workers and customers missing in corporate giants. If a trusted employee has financial trouble, the small business owner will know and may help. In the large corporation, the employee's difficulties are not known nor are they aided. In any event, the employee knows the small business owner would know who stole any significant funds. Small businesses cannot afford to hire private security patrols and must rely on the C.J.S. for protection.

Private justice systems have few constitutional protections. The judges are usually top echelon managers. Justice is swift and irreversible. For most, there is no appeal. The employee is fired. The customer must pay for what has been pilfered or face the C.J.S. Only the wealthy could afford to contest the national retailing corporation in a public court room.

The form of justice in the P.J.S. is ordinarily distributive. The customer or employee must restore conditions to their original state before the theft or conversion. Usually the guilty customer or the guilty employee is only too happy to make things right rather than face the embarrassment and the inconvenience of the C.J.S. Corporate officers are often helpful and lenient in the terms of payment and repayment. There is a minimum of adverse publicity and public disgrace since, in the same moment, the corporation brings disgrace upon itself. The prudent customer would avoid stores, shops, and markets with a reputation for retributive justice or mean spirited distributive justice. The culpable employee could make much mischief were it treated too shabbily...especially middle and upper echelon employees.

The P.J.S. is large and growing for a variety of reasons. Shoplifting and checkwriting varies with economic conditions. In the U.S., a large and permanent underclass of the working poor and the unwaged has grown. People in this stratum reunite production and distribution by crimes against property including both large and small retail outlets. Hostility at big business continues. Take home pay of lower echelon workers has declined since 1969. Corporate crime itself is occasionally publicized. Corporate profits in the monopoly sector hold at 15% in the face of economic crises. To steal from the rich resonates with the populist attitudes of America. It is a primitive form of street justice but is partially theoretical in that it does properly identify the class enemy. At least one isn't stealing from one poorer and weaker than one.

Life crises of employees, especially white collar employees, continue. Home foreclosures are at an all­time high rate since the 30's. Divorce brings about financial troubles for lower echelon employees and corporate officers. Economic cycles affect the investments of top echelon employees, some of whom have opportunity to steal from the corporation. In every organization there are any number of employees who, rightly or wrongly feel they are treated shabbily by the company. Passed over for promotion, subjected to personal humiliation by 'superiors', excluded from credit for creative work or simply angry at life, these employees spend time thinking about how to get even. All these factors and more target big business as a likely victim. All these imperatives for white collar crime push the corporate world to build its own police force...one it can control.

The private corporation could use the C.J.S. but that would mean the continued presence of a policing force not directly under the command of the corporate hierarchy. Such a force would inevitably have proper cause to police the top echelon and the organization itself. Since most white collar crime is committed by that top hierarchy, it would be inviting discovery were there to be a permanent public policing presence on the grounds. There is, also, a sort of gentleman's code that one does not call the cops on one's associates in the business and professional world. And, for upper middle class shops, stores, and firms, any hint of routine policing by the boys in blue would drive away customers. The upper middle class do not care for the presence of police in their lives. Hence private security costs, transferred to the public, are preferable. For those stores which mass merchandize goods to the working class, especially to minorities, private security forces do not hesitate to call the city police (Young,1987).

F. THE PEER REVIEW SYSTEM. (P.R.S.) The Peer Review System handles the delicts of a professional group. Together with the private justice system above, the P.R.S. controls white collar crime. For professors, lawyers, priests, doctors, accountants, real estate agents, dentists, and other quasi­autonomous groups, the various law­making bodies exclude them from jurisdiction and accept in­house policing and adjudicating procedures. One is policed and tried by one's peers, who are also one's colleagues, partners, schoolmates, friends and references. The P.R.S. is located in the solid upper middle sector of society.

Policing of the P.R.S. is casual, loose, infrequent, gentle and forbearing. At its best, it helps professionals to provide better service and to be better human beings. Middle class college professors who teach while drunk, who harass students sexually, who convert state property to private use, who use drugs or have other businesses in conflict with their teaching and research responsibilities are seldom subjected to the stringencies of the C.J.S. Doctors who overprescribe, overcut, overcharge and conspire with colleagues to overtreat patients are overlooked by the P.R.S. Only flagrant and repeated abuse will trigger the P.R.S.

Lawyers, C.P.A.s, stockbrokers, military officers, bankers, psychologists, priestly functionaries and a dozen other professions claim exemption from the C.J.S. on the grounds of esoteric knowledge or special conditions. Such groups, as a rule, use that dispensation to cover up the harm they do to the clients with whom they have a special trust relationship. Such groups create a 'code of ethics' which are so generously constituted that they can exploit the clients who trust them within those rules still find occasion to transgress even these self-serving ethics.

In others Lectures, I have identified several economic factors endemic to capitalist relations which foster white collar crime (Young, 1978, 1980, 1983). Some of these have been mentioned above in the discussion of the necessity for a private justice system parallel to the C.J.S. In addition to the modeling presented to the employees of corporations which routinely break the law; in addition to the animosity toward the corporation for real and imagined insult to the employee, in addition to the various life crises which can hit even the middle class, in addition to the populist attitude that big business is a suitable target for crime informed by a partially theoretical understanding of the sources of wealth and poverty, in addition to all of these, there are several other conditions in the dynamics of the capitalist system which promote the crime of employees and agents in a position of trust.

A major impetus for white collar crime are the false needs generated by the capitalist corporation in its effort to realize profit from those with discretionary income. A 110 billion dollar advertizing industry (1986 figure) uses the best actors, writers, singers, photographers, and psychologists to generate a demand on the part of those with money to spend it. The industry floods the electronic and print media with thousands of ads which define the possession of material goods as the test of a good and successful life. The middle class responds to this imperative even more than do the street criminals. In order to maintain this life style fueled by false needs in times of personal crises: divorce, layoff, stockmarket decline, medical emergency or other, the white collar employee will on occasion embezzle, defraud, evade taxes, or simply steal from those who trust.

Another source of white collar crime is the need for a portfolio. It would be a foolish professional indeed who enters into the senior years without a portfolio. For a middle class lifestyle after retirement, one needs a portfolio of at least $500,000.00. At 7% return on investment, one can retire at $35,000.00. For those professionals innocent enough to retire on social security, they might receive $9000.00 per year upon which to live. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and employees of trust in the corporation or the state agency begin to think about the awful prospect of living on social security as they approach 50 years of age. If they parasitize upon their clients and if they are caught and if they are not strategically located in the medical profession they may go through the peer review system.

Typically, such a doctor (or lawyer or professor) will be charged with some form of flagrant violation of a trust relationship. If the complaining party has sufficient social power, a panel of peers will be constituted and a semi­formal hearing of evidence will be undertaken. If the evidence is compelling, some token penalty will be imposed. The case will be closed. The C.J.S. and the A.J.S. will honor these pro forma hearings as having satisfied the need for justice. As a rule, there is no appeal and little justice. The P.R.S. is more a guardian of the privileges of a profession than a social control agent.

The New York Times (12­1­85, p.1A) reports that of 80,000 practicing lawyers in New York State, there were 8,766 complaints made to the various County Bar Associations in 1983. Of these 8,766 complaints, 131 lawyers were disbarred or suspended and 12 were censured. Most people who are the victims of professionals do not bother to seek justice in the P.R.S. However damage suits are increasing. In a society oriented to private accumulation, false needs, pathological individualism, life crises as well as class, gender and racial antagonisms, such a trust relationship is easily transgressed. As professionals become more rapacious, more indifferent to the fate of their clients, and closer to retirement, civil suits increase. As doctors become wealthier, they become likely targets for civil action given reasonable cause. As lawyers become less collegial as far as other professionals are concerned, they begin to prey upon the real and imagined wrongs done to the clients of professionals. Even students are beginning to sue professors for malpractice.

The days of the Peer Review System may be numbered. In its 11 January, 1987 Report an American Bar Association Commission urged that lawyers who filed "frivolous" law suits be disciplined by the State. This recommendation met with great opposition on the part of the State Bar leaders. They objected to non-lawyers engaged in the sanctioning of unethical lawyers in that they would be policed too "aggressively." The Commission Report was changed to recommend that " discipline of lawyers should continue to be the responsibility" of state supreme courts "in order to safeguard the rights of all citizens." (Orlando Sentinel, 15 Feb. 87). It is not clear how such a system of social control safeguards any but the lawyers themselves.

G. THE MEDICAL CONTROL SYSTEM. (M.C.S.) The Medical Justice System has gradually taken over from the C.J.S. a wide variety of behaviors formerly labeled as crime. The trend is to decriminalize the kinds of delicts of the middle classes by calling them madness or illness rather than badness. Drug use, child abuse, gambling, homosexuality, adultery, abortion, alcoholism, shoplifting and drunk driving as well as wife beating, rape and occasionally murder by the middle and upper classes have been claimed by the medical and allied professions as within their purview. The middle class have been quick to take medical sanctuary from the agents of the C.J.S.

Judges have been lenient in accepting this exemption for the middle class but very reluctant to do so for the sons and daughters of the poor, especially minorities. The class and race bias in the medical justice system compromises the M.C.S. and converts it into a structural means to reproduce class and race privilege. A number of studies have commented on the use of the medical system to control the behavior of women who get depressed by the alienating work they do at home and at the office (cited in Hutter and Williams, 1981). Illich discusses the 'valium' economy at length in his work on the economics of gender (1982).

In the M.C.S., a person consults a physician or a psychiatrist, asks for therapy, is accepted as a client and then uses that client status as protection from the C.J.S. Alternatively, a person is arrested and enters into the C.J.S., pleas not guilty by reason of emotional distress or mental incompetence and requests transfer to and treatment from the M.J.S. for an 'illness' in lieu of punishment for a 'crime.'

Goffman, in Asylums (1961), has laid out the career of the patient in fairly complete terms. There is a degradation process in which the person accepts the patient role, submits to the authority of the medical system, follows a course of therapy­­usually self criticism, verbal disclosure in group therapy or chemotherapy­­and after a time is pronounced healed and then released back to the social base.

In the M.C.S., there are few constitutional protections, few sanctions (other than the stigma of a mental patient) and, often, little loss of personal freedom for most delicts. The patient places itself or is placed by a court under the supervision of the physician and submits to the regime of therapy ordered by the physician as long as the threat of legal action in the C.J.S. remains. Once in the medical system, the person in question is watched closely for recurrence of the "symptoms" and is treated as long as these behaviors continue.

The dominant form of deviancy treated in the M.C.S. are those against the moral order­­sexual variations and substance abuse. These are now called "victimless crimes." In a highly individualistic society informed by the logics of free enterprize, most actions are seen to be a matter of private choice. Sexuality and ecstatic behavior involving drugs are held to be a matter of private contract between consenting adults. Organized crime now produces and distributes such sacred supplies traditionally used to create solidarity. As the commodification of these supplies continues, the tension between the communal and private use of sex, drugs, alcohol and other psychogenic substances creates laws which forbid privatized use, markets serving private usage as well as competition between the police and the medical profession over jurisdiction for those who abuse themselves and others in the pursuit of privatized ecstasy.

The Medicalization of crime, then, can be seen to be part of the decriminalization of control on sacred social supplies and activities. In mass acquisitive societies which stress individualism, there is a gradual dissolution of the moral order as the basis of human conduct is displaced from long term communal and primary group interaction by short term anonymous relations in the market place. Privatized individuals, especially the rich and the superrich, can treat all sacred supplies as mere commodities and use them for quite private purposes outside of the traditional social forms in which drugs, alcohol, sex and violence are used to create a sense of the sacred. Historically, such sacred supplies are used only within sacred occasions in order to create the solidarity of a primary group (Young, 1966).

I. THE RELIGIOUS JUSTICE SYSTEM. Although a recent Roper poll (Mar. '87) reported that 81% of Americans list religion as an important life activity, most of the time most people in the United States are little concerned by the system of religious control. Those who do take religion seriously submit themselves to the judgment of religious functionaries and insist that their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and husbands do so as well. Included in those who do take religion seriously are the millions of born again Christians as well are many Catholics, the Orthodox Jews, the Hutterites, and a hundred religious enclaves inspired by Eastern Religions or even more exotic theodicies.

Such people present themselves for private judgment to their priests, ministers, congregations or gurus confessing to a wide variety of delicts from adultery, alcoholism, theft, incest, battery and homicide. They rise before a congregation, admit guilt, ask for help and prayer, testify to the help already received and promise to do better. They bring their children to the priest and force confession, seek guidance and accept a judgment over weeks, months and years. The fundamentalist preacher calls forth people in the religious community to account for their behavior and insist upon renunciation of the temptation. On occasion there is a ceremony of disengagement in which the offender is publicly judged and separated from the community­­in some rare cases the offender is treated as if dead by shunning or by funeral service.

Those who submit to the RJS often believe that there is a Justice beyond 'man-made' law.  The belief entails:

a. the concept of a divinely inspired plan for social life
b. the concept of a supernatural Being who sees, knows and judges all human behavior
c. the concept of an after-life in which one is blessed or suffers depending on how
    closely the person conformed to the Plan.

Guilt, shame and prayer join with pain and anguish to minimize behavior incompatible with 'God's
Plan.  As a control system, it developed along with the species and has regulated behavior more closely and more effectively than formal control systems above. The problem with the Religious Control System is that, with the secularization of society, religion has been sequestered to a small corner of social life.  Apart from the merits of 'God's Plan,' the Religious Justice System continues to diminish.

The control agents are usually religious functionaries but the power to judge, punish and rehabilitate is sometimes distributed more broadly in the religious community and is vested in all adults. There are no constitutional protections, little appeal, and sometimes, great benefit.

The harm done by the offender is usually confined to the moral order centering around violations of rules of marriage, of sexual repression, of kinship duties, of community norms for cooperative work and responsible behavior. Harm done to outside persons or social norms is rare and more rarely policed. Property crimes are seldom policed. The form of sanction is usually guilt or shame in which one is lowered in the esteem of significant members of the community often for life. Sometimes small penance or open confession is required. There is very little cost to the community in creating and employing this system. It is rapidly diminished as society every day grows more secular.

The Religious Justice System (R.J.S.) is located primarily in the lower working class and among women and minorities. (See Diagrams III, IV above.) In the U.S., some 11­15 million people in the Protestant sects and churches of the lower class strata firmly believe in divine judgment, eternal damnation and the reality of sin. Additional millions of Catholics regularly confess, do penance, gain grace and find their lives the better for it.

Most religious policing is oriented more to protecting and preserving the solidarity of the religious community than in punishment and exclusion of individuals. There are cases where people are excommunicated, and more rarely, physically punished but usually religious justice is more supportive and facilitative rather than punitive and debilitating. The emphasis is upon distributive forms of justice...one is to repair the harm done to the moral order and sin no more.

Religion, as an institution, is losing credibility and membership. There are temporal and regional variations but the world trend seems to be toward secular systems of social control. These are easier to bend to the interests of the rich and powerful than are priestly judges who listen more to divine scripture than to secular law. Liberation Theology, especially, insists on social behavior oriented to the common good more than most systems which claim to be systems of justice. Clergy in the Catholic church are caught up in the vast transformations of the third world, especially in Latin America and the Philippines and are acting on their understandings of the teaching of early Christianity. Combining those teachings with the class analyses of marxists, these priests and nuns act on behalf of the poor and against the brutality of power and wealth in Central America, South America and elsewhere. Pope John Paul and others in the hierarchy reject such theology and use the power of the church to discipline such priests.

H. SOCIAL WELFARE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. There are about 10 million adults and 18 million children who come permanently under the aegis of the Social Welfare system in America. These are mostly women and their dependent children. There are another 40 million or so who come into occasional contact with the social justice system for temporary help with resources. Their behavior is policed on a number of dimensions and this policing is one useful way to think about the social welfare system. Some 345,000 social workers police the sexual life, household habits, child rearing practices and workplace practices of the poor and the disemployed. One is to be thrifty, obedient, truthful, humble, clean, sober, hard working, punctual, sexually abstinent and self sacrificing to one's children or one is to be punished by denial of resources.

But there is another, more generous way to understand social welfare in America. As mean spirited, cheap­sided and coercive as it is, still the very existence of the system recognizes vast injustices in social and economic situations and tries to redeem those injustices.

Quadagno (1987) has set forth a brief history of the welfare state and a review of the major theories of the American version. She notes there is a case to be made for the view that it is largely a repressive social control mechanism (p.117). In the U.S., the welfare programs not only are less helpful than the other advanced capitalist nations, but its programs are bifurcated: social insurance with dignity for the majority and social assistance with indignities for the poor (p.111). In the current fiscal crisis, all advanced capitalist societies are reviewing these programs of social justice but in the United States attacks on them are focussed most intensely on income maintenance programs for the poor; which disproportionately help women and minorities (p.125).

It is for two reasons I call the Social Welfare system a justice system. It does have a body of rules, impartially applied with a judging routine as well as a weak appeals system. It does try to repair the harm done by exploitative relations. As with most other systems of justice, there are few constitutional safeguards and judging can be highly variable.

Social welfare programs arise out of the contradiction between wage labor dynamics and communitarian social wage imperatives. In a economy in which there is a built-in motive to reduce the costs of labor in order to increase profits, employers try to replace workers with machines or move to cheaper labor markets. In a society where communitarian values still persist, there is a social base for distribution based upon need rather than profit in order to assist those who cannot find work. Out of this disjuncture, social welfare programs emerge. Since the 1930's, such programs in all the markets economies have grown rapidly.

In a fully communal system of social justice, resources are distributed on the basis of personal need, merit, and social solidarity occasions. In a profit oriented system, the primary constraint on welfare is the price of labor in the labor market. A welfare state must keep welfare below minimum wage or persons with other priorities won't work. Mothers, for instance, would tend to stay home and look after children. This market imperative which requires that access to social goods be lower than minimum wage also requires policing. This policing turns social welfare in America into a degrading, frustrating experience for recipient and case worker alike.

III. THEORIZING ABOUT JUSTICE. When one contemplates the features and social location of crime and justice in the U.S., several propositions present themselves for explaining the various distribution patterns. The operative question is, Why are there several separate and unequal justice systems? The short answer is that they, together, reproduce the structure of inequality while preserving the form of equality. There is a formal equality within each justice system and, at the same time, considerable inequality between systems. This transcendent inequality before the law is seldom visible since there are seldom visible cases in which the assignment to differing justice systems is problematic. Young black males are unquestionably assigned to the C.J.S. Major corporations such as General Dynamics are unquestionably assigned to the A.J.S. Within each system there is a formal (if loose) equality. Young Black males cannot fairly say they were treated unjustly compared to other young, Black males . . . only that they were more or less lucky in the draw of the judge, jury or prison. Multinational firms are never the target of SWAT teams, F.B.I. burglaries, or undercover surveillance by police even when their routine practices do grievous harm to employees, customers, competitors and to the communities they desert for higher profit elsewhere. Multinational corporations cannot say that they are unfairly treated by the A.J.S. since the rules call for equal justice under the law. Since the systems of law vary, substantive injustice is preserved while technical justice prevails. Inequality, once removed in terms of differing systems levels, provides a gloss of legitimacy to justice in an unjust meta-system.

The longer answer is a bit more complex and a bit less visible. As Weiner (1985) points out, the U.S. is a neo-corporatist state in which the central state assigns power to competing interest groups for the day to day operations of the economy but retains power to control competing interests when such competition threatens the integrity of the whole economy. The assignment of policing power to private organizations via the A.J.S., the P.R.S., the P.J.S., the M.J.S., and the R.J.S. is rational in that it decentralizes decision making, simplifies it, and facilitates response to local conditions. This is ordinarily a good principle of governance. However, in a society marked by inequality, justice can vary greatly between strata.

The prior question is, of course, why is the state intruding at all in the private sphere­­why not assign all control functions to competing entities in the private sphere? The answer is that such an assignment builds into the economy a great irrationality in terms of allocations of resources. Resources flow from the small business to big; from low profit lines of production to high; from one ethnic group to another. This is irrational in the long term since the system is interdependent and the privations of one sector in due time impairs the operation of other even stronger and wealthier sectors. At the same time, political legitimacy suffers from such exploitation and inequality. Rebellion and resistance take on more theoretically informed targets, more collectively organized politics, and more communally oriented policies. Street politics tend to displace street crime as the preferred mode of rebellion.

The state enters, in limited fashion, with subsidies, grants, loans, and laws to limit inequality. The state regulates the flow of wealth from patients to doctors, from employees to employers, from customers to giant corporations, from Black workers to Anglo owners, from poor families to rich families. Thus the State can minimize the costs of educating the next generation of workers, of preserving the health of this generation of workers, of providing housing subsidies, and for all of the other necessary costs of reproducing the social order.

There is also the problem of legitimacy. Clearly the U.S. economy can survive by discriminating against Blacks, eliminating a lot of small business, casting off the aged and the ill but the U.S. as with most of the advanced industrialized societies of the West does not. The welfare state does enter in to contain the worse excesses of unrestrained competition. It does put limits on private policing and administrative injustice within a system. Political democracies, in spite of a variety of mechanisms to minimize it, must respond to voters.
In undemocratic capitalist nations, the power of the state is used to repress the quest for transcendental justice.

Workers, Blacks, women, the aged and others on the bottom side of a hierarchy, can, on occasion, use state power against the economic or social power of the ruling coalitions of interest groups. For the most part this demand for justice is absorbed by the State in its many makeshift welfare programs (Quadagno, 1987) but in the end the state sets real limits to the crimes of the powerful against workers, customers, minorities, communities or against the environment. Out of the political struggles of workers, minorities, consumers and others harmed by unjust relations come the laws which define criminal effect as criminal act.

Such limitation of the rich and powerful serves to reduce problems of political legitimacy while leaving intact various and unequal justice systems. But problems of accumulation develop for corporations and for the wealthy when there is substantive justice in social relations. The corporation suffers a profit crisis if it has to obey the law, i.e., to be fair to its own employees, to its own customers, clean up its own waste, pay fair prices to other owners for raw materials and producers goods and, as well, pay taxes for programs of social justice for those disemployed by automation, disinvestment, or depressions, those cast off, those injured or those driven out of business by financial giants. The accumulation problems of private ownership can be solved, in part, by inequality between justice systems.

As long as wealth comes to the United States from outside economies, resources exist to provide for all the many costs of social justice. But when imperial states lose empires, lose markets abroad, lose access to cheap raw materials or lose wars, social justice at home is very problematic.

Mr. Reagan came to power in a society marked by programs of social justice established in the 30's, 50's, 60's and 70's. He arrived in the presidency just as American business was losing its market hegemony in the Third World to Japan, Germany, South Africa, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Israel and other competitors. Mr. Reagan came to power as liberation fronts were gathering to keep more wealth within the borders of El Salvador, the Philippines and Nicaragua. His solution was to downgrade the system of administrative justice at home, to reduce expenditures for programs of social justice in the U.S., and to contain movements toward social justice in the Third World. Justice in America is built, in part, in the U.S. maintaining the vast injustice of the world economic order.

Justice and the various justice systems are mediated by and reproduce the four great stratifications of power, wealth and social horror in America: the class system, the gender system, the system of racial discrimination, and the system of international privilege.

In summary form, the conclusions one can draw, tentatively, from the discussion above about justice in America include:

1. Justice systems vary with race, class and gender. This variation tends to reproduce the structures of power and privilege.

2. The two largest and more punitive systems; private security and the criminal justice system focus upon the working poor and the permanent underclass.

3. The Black community is subject to more repressive justice than is any other sector of society.

4. Women are policed more by social workers, therapists and physicians or psychiatrists. This keeps women at home doing unpaid domestic service and childcare duties. Males are policed by the C.J.S. and, increasingly, by high-tech tactics.

5. Corporate crime is the most dangerous form of crime and the most lightly controlled.

6. The Medical Justice System exculpates and protects middle class Criminals from the C.J.S.

7. Peer Review Systems protect and exculpate professional groups from the C.J.S.

8. The Administrative Justice System embodies what little concern for the common good remains as citizens' groups are able to force through the law­making institutions.

9. In times of economic crisis, retributive justice increases and distributive justice decreases. The costs of all forms of social control increase during economic crisis.

10. The Private Justice System develops to provide private corporations more private control over rule­making, enforcing, adjudication and punishment.

11. The civil justice (tort) system develops to provide some justice in a society marked by conflict relations. As conflict increases, the C.T.S. tends to increase.

12. The Religious Justice System is often inimical to the privileges of power and wealth. It is declining except among the working poor.

13. The Military Justice System is an adjunct to the C.J.S. The M.J.S. controls the young men, mostly minority, who are forced into the military by the wage labor market.

14. There is a slow trend for the Medical Justice System to appropriate the middle class participants in organized production and distribution of vice to its own paradigm of illness.

15. Justice in American is bought, in significant measure, by the great injustices built into the world capitalist system. We buy our very real, very important freedoms and social justice at the expense of the poorest, more oppressed peoples in the world.

III. CONCLUSION. All of these justice systems, taken together, comprise the formal social control apparatus of advanced industrial society. A wide variety of crimes grow out of the ordinary, everyday workings of profit-oriented economies. A wide variety of social control systems informed by a wide variety of justice imperatives arise to control that crime. Such control technologies absorb an ever-increasing part of the national resources.

Crime and justice in America are part of the costs of a competitive, profit-oriented economy. Those costs grow yearly. At some point the policies of crime control must be the transition from retributive justice to distributive justice. To that end, one needs good theory about crime and justice. In other Lectures, I have tried to summarize the major assumptions of a Critical theory of crime. In this Lecture, I offer a start on a Critical theory of justice.

We are putting together a system of social control for a permanent underclass which compares to the worst of the "Brave New World" scenarios. That control system is made up of the C.J.S., together with the welfare system, the private security system and, if the young are lucky, the various military services. For poor women, the welfare system, religious functionaries, and domineering males in the family are the chief agents of social control. Wealthier women can be controlled by the medical justice system. For the rich and powerful, there is wealth, acclaim, and benign neglect of the crimes they commit. In the unlikely event the harmful activity they create is defined as illegal, they are not likely to be policed. If they are policed, they are not likely to be indicted. If they are indicted, it is highly unlikely they will go through the criminal justice system. Rather, they will go through an administrative justice system or a civil proceedings in which the consequences are far different from those of the criminal justice system. Along with social welfare, the C.J.S. comprises the main social control institutions for the working poor and the underclass in America. The Black community is heavily policed by these and the religious system of control.

One may rightly ask: Where is the justice in this?

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Footnotes

1.

The social dynamics at work in the case of these militias is very complex and is outside the purview of this paper. However one can say that most of the opposition to state power is grounded upon religious philosophy which, in turn, validates claims to special privilege of men, of ethnic groups, of religious values in family life and/or specific territories. Return