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10 Contemp. Crises 3 (1986)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc10 and id is 1 raw text is: Contemporary Crises 10: 3-4 (1986) © Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands Editorial introduction STAN COHEN The whole of this issue of the journal is devoted to one subject -'abolitionism'. This is the name given to a stream of theory and practise, mainly in Western Europe, devoted to the radical critique and replacement of the whole criminal justice system. Abolitionism is the product of the same countercultural politics of the Nineteen Sixties which gave rise to the cultural radicalism of labelling theory and the political radicalism of the 'new' or 'critical' criminology. Abolitionism, though, has turned out to be the more durable and uncompromising of these critiques. It assumes labelling theory's relativism and its insistence on the problematic status of deviant labels - but moves beyond interactional ques- tions of stigma and identity to a historically informed sense of 'crime' as unique from of social control. It assumes the critical school's attack on conventional criminology and its alternative theory of law and the state - but instead of searching for a socialist criminology and crime policy ('left-realism'), it en- visages the eventual abandonment of crime and criminology as viable con- structs. As these papers show, abolitionism is not a consistent theory nor can it be easily systematized. It is a peculiar mixture of the highly concrete and the grandly visionary, of low level social engineering with high level epistemologi- cal speculation. Its practitioners are just as comfortable in counting the number of prison cells in Holland, observing how urban communes deal with members who don't wash the dishes and theorizing about the nature of Medieval law. All this makes for some confusion ('romanticism', according to critics from the left and the right) but it is always a creative and stimulating confusion - the best kind. With the exception of a few scattered writings of its leading figures - Nils Christie, Louk Hulsman and Thomas Mathiesen - the abolitionist paradigm is largely unknown in North America. It seems to us important to open to an English speaking audience debates which are now well-known in Holland, France, Germany, Italy and the Scandinavian Countries. None of these papers is a simple introduction or summary. Each presents a somewhat different angle on how the author sees the place of abolitionist ideas: thus Christie's critique starts with the criminal law, Hulsman with the concept of crime and Mathiesen with the prison system. Commentaries by other authors deal with methodological and philosophical issues (De Folter - who also locates Fou- cault's work in the abolitionist frame); the history of punitive justice (Steinert

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