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27 Crime & Delinquency 1 (1981)

handle is hein.journals/cadq27 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction It is not the purpose of this special issue of Crime & Delinquency to contrib- ute to the continuing debate about the adequacy of radical criminological the- ories in the abstract. Rather, we have invited a group of scholars who are adherents of (or are at least sympathetic to) radical theories to apply those theories to concrete problems in crime and justice. In soliciting contributions for the issue, we did not restrict our invitations to Marxist scholars, but sought to bring to our readers' attention varying types of radical thought. Nevertheless, many of the authors do share a Marx- ist orientation. This should not be surprising: To be radical means to go to the roots of issues, tearing away appearance; and this is exactly what Marxist theory claims to do. But radicals also work to draw attention to problems that have been obscured-not because they are minor or inherently difficult to observe, but because prevailing social structures and values direct attention away from them and act as barriers even to defining them as problems. Thus, in the broadest sense, a radical approach should direct us to new issues or to new ways of looking at old issues. One does not have to be a Marxist to take such an approach. The first two articles deal with the economic structure. It has become popu- lar, recently, to apply traditional economic concepts and tools to criminal jus- tice topics, such as deterrence and optimum law enforcement expenditures. Most of the applications have been far from radical; the tendency has been to find ways of making state control more efficient. In the opening article, Harold Barnett employs the concepts of traditional economics in an analysis of corporate crime-a topic which, despite the massive human and property losses involved, has received less than its share of attention in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Barnett examines how the economic struc- ture of corporate capitalism produces particular types of corporate crime, de- termines the distribution of different types of crimes across different types of firms, and limits the nature and scope of enforcement activities. The possible ways of contending with the problem of corporate crime that he sketches are not as far reaching as those suggested by Marxists, but they are probably more attainable in the foreseeable future. The contribution by Jeffrey Reiman and Sue Headlee focuses on the eco- nomic problems that have been in the headlines during the past year-un- employment, recession, inflation-and relates these to current trends in crimi- nal justice policy. They take an explicitly Marxist perspective, and devote considerable attention to explaining how Marxist economic theory has been misrepresented in criminology and what the real elements of the theory are. The third article, by Paul Takagi, discusses the shortcomings of the stan- dard ways of doing research in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. He argues that research using objective data, although useful in certain cir- cumstances, deals mostly with appearance and cannot penetrate the meaning of crime and justice for the racial and ethnic minorities that bear the brunt of CRIME & DELINQUENCY, January 1981 1

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