Twenty-Five Years of Involvement in Social Justice

My involvement with the journal dates back to its beginning years, in 1974. I joined the editorial board for the second issue of Crime and Social Justice. At the time, I was a secretary in the Italian Department at U.C. Berkeley, and my then-partner, Greg Shank, was a student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, which was at its apex of radicalism and student activism. Though I was not a student, through Greg I had a real connection to the school, and given the inclusive spirit of the period, no one cared that I was not a student. I was able to audit courses, join organizations, and generally participate in the radical criminology movement. I was among the first members of Bay Area Women Against Rape. BAWAR was founded in 1972 by Julia Schwendinger and other women from the community, some of them students, others not. By 1976, that experience had led me to the study of public health education in the U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health's master's program. These were formative experiences in terms of my political awareness and shaped my activities and consciousness from then on. I honed new skills by working on the journal: I coordinated an issue, wrote an article, and learned to edit. Greg and I soon became involved in the journal's administration. We computerized the subscription list. In those days, that meant disappearing into the basement caverns of U.C. Berkeley's Evans Hall, where we keypunched the information and prayed that the huge mainframe computers would cooperate. That technology is primitive by our current standards, where everything is managed at the Social Justice office on two computers by one full-time managing editor (Greg Shank), a part-time assistant managing editor (me), and a part-time staff member (Kim Maddox). Our editorial board has changed in composition over the years and has expanded over the last two years, much to the enrichment of the journal. In the early years, we had debates over centralized and decentralized models for the journal's operation. Eventually, we adopted a hybrid form, first with decentralized Guest Editors and our own board generating issues, and now with even a decentralized board. My role has been to liaison between the Managing Editor and the Editorial Board, to facilitate communications within the Editorial Board and with Guest Editors, and to help shepherd along future issues, including elements of marketing. Technology in the form of e-mail has made decentralization simpler and truly interactive. The early journal staff contained many people with experience in journal publishing, but we had to improvise in the areas of production and marketing. We also became vagabonds once the university administration's repression against the radicals led to the abolition of the School of Criminology in June 1976. Many of our editorial board members had to move away, either to other schools or to take jobs outside the Bay Area. Only a few of us remained to continue with the work of putting out the journal. Before the journal ultimately moved off campus, we had a small windowless office in the U.C. School of Education, thanks to Paul Takagi, one of the journal's founders and a professor of criminology who survived the firings at the School of Criminology only because he was tenured and was relocated to the School of Education. Tony Platt and Hi Schwendinger did not fare so well. In spite of intense student protests and appeals to the administration, both lost their jobs at U.C. Changes in the journal during the 1980s mirrored shifts in the broader political landscape. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist states, we remained committed to providing material on a new strategy and a redefinition of local and global struggles for social justice. The journal merged with Contemporary Marxism, changed its name to Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order, and became a quarterly. The influx of Latin Americanists, who were steeped in world-systems theory, onto the Board broadened the contents beyond its initial focus on the criminal justice system, political repression, and antiwar and anti-imperialist analyses. …