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1 J. Hum. Just. 1 (1989-1990)

handle is hein.journals/ctlcrm1 and id is 1 raw text is: Editor's Introduction Critical Justice Studies in Canada Brian D. MacLean Department of Anthropology/Sociology, University of British Columbia British criminologists know one another, they educate one another, they sometimes marry one another, they read each other's works and they gossip about each other. Criminologists must meet repeatedly in conferences, committees, seminars, pressure groups and in Boards of examiners and editors. For practical purposes at least, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a substantial distance between them....An intellectual and political generation in their thirties and forties dominates the sociology of crime and deviance. Its agenda was set largely in the 1960s and 1970s,focussing on problems of interactionism, feminism and Marxism... (Rock, 1988:197-8) What a stark contrast between Rock's description of contemporary British criminology and that of Canadian criminology provided within the pages of this, the first issue of The Journal of Human Justice. Due to the lack of proximity, many criminologists hardly know one another personally, so that the collegiality of the British community remains largely undeveloped in Canada. Conferences, committees, seminars and pressure groups are often avoided. While we analyze political realities, we often avoid practical confrontation with them. Thus, in some ways it has become increasingly simple to maintain a substantial distance between ourselves. The problems of Marxism, and feminism in particular, were not even on the criminological agenda in the 1970s. Indeed, even now, among male progres- sives, there are still operant forms of structural resistance to feminist scholarship in which we practice, but about which we are still personally unaware. What we do have in common with British Criminology, however, is the way in which our legacy is reconstructed inter-generationally. In his history of British criminology, Rock argues that: Intellectually, the discipline has achieved a great deal and it has grown in reflectiveness. There are new historians of ideas who are starting to interpret what has occurred. But, as yet, the story has not been told and newcomers do not seem to know their past. They construct a history out of fragments of polemic, gossip, myth and old analysis. (1988a:vii). Perhaps, for these reasons, and as indicated in this volume there may be little agreement between Canadian critical criminologists as to the exact nature of the object of their inquiry; however, a forum in which the exchange of ideas is facilitated is crucial to defining and broadening our intellectual and practical concerns. Otherwise, as is evident from the British experience, another painful exercise of in camera self-clarification might easily degenerate into even further diversity which Stenson argues: has become a hopeless fragmentation, with post-Gramscian superstructural Marxism, which emphasises the relative autonomy of law and the state vis d vis economic relations, tending to dilute the explanatory emphasis on class struggle. (1989:192) 1

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