THE SOCIAL LOCATION OF JUSTICE IN AMERICA 

                           T. R. Young

                    The Red Feather Institute


                         February, 1987 




No. 120      Prepared for the 1987 Meetings of the Pacific
Sociological Society.  Circulated as part of the Transforming
Criminology Series by the Red Feather Institute.  



           THE SOCIAL LOCATION OF JUSTICE IN AMERICA 


                            Abstract 
     Eight systems of justice are discussed and located  in
     their proximate place in the social order.  From the
     variations in the location and operation of these dif-
     ferent systems of justice, several propositions are
     derived which may be helpful in the formation of a more
     comprehensive theory of crime and justice in modern
     societies.



I.  INTRODUCTION.  In this paper 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 these data, 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 paper 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 sanctioning of human behavior in place in
the United States.  The eight include: 1a) the criminal justice
system, 1b) the Military Justice system, 2) the Administrative
Regulatory Agencies of the Federal State, and Local governments,
3) the civil justice system, 4) the Peer Review system for pro-
fessionals, 5) the Private Security system which monitors emplo-
yees, 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.  There are other control systems mentioned
later which are not the focus here.

     All of these control systems have as their objective the
establishment of a system to repress some forms of behavior
within a given framework 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, ordinarily,
justice simply means the rational application of abstract rules
to problematic 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 an adjective, is restricted to the question of validity of the
applications of or deductions from law and legal principles, 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/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 idea of justice is the
province of politics rather than of the administrative agencies
which constitute the justice systems. 

      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 organiza-
tions, 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 ordinary usage in American criminology, in order for a
system to be a justice system, there must be 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.

     The realm of civil law and such informal justice systems
such as the K.K.K., and the Jewish Defense League or the
political underground are omitted here.  Some 22 secret agencies
of the Federal government engage in punitive action as do the
various military services.  The F.B.I., for example, in the past
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).

     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 allo-
cating public resources to those so harmed.  (See Appendix B.) 
The state welfare system: social security, unemployment com-
pensation, 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
mean-spirited, 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 paper (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 gover-
nment 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 con-
stitute 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. 

                    (Diagram I about here)

     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 paper.

     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 unre-
movable 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 gov-
ernment in the U.S. is under pressure to greatly expand this part
of the system of justice.

                     [Diagram II about here] 

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 filter--catching 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.  

                    (Diagram III about here)

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 preform 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 avarious
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.

                     (Diagram VI about here)

     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 sub-section 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 labelled 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, cor-
porate 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 emp-
loyee'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 dis-
tributive.  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 emplo-
yees.   

     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 all-time 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 quasi-autonomous groups,
the various law-making bodies exclude them from jurisdiction and
accept in-house 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 forebearing.  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 papers, 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 modelling
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 rela-
tionship.  If the complaining party has sufficient social power,
a panel of peers will be constituted and a semi-formal 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 (12-1-85, 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 re-
tirement, 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 JUSTICE SYSTEM. (M.J.S.)  The Medical Justice
System has gradually taken over from the C.J.S. a wide variety of
behaviors formerly labelled 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.J.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.J.S., a person consults a physician or a psychia-
trist, 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 au-
thority of the medical system, follows a course of
therapy--usually self criticism, verbal disclosure in group
therapy or chemotherapy--and after a time is pronounced healed
and then released back to the social base.

     In the M.J.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.J.S. are
those against the moral order--sexual 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 com-
munity--in some rare cases the offender is treated as if dead by
shunning or by funeral service.

     The control agents are usually religious functionaries but
the power to judge, punish and rehabilitate is sometimes distri-
buted 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 co-
operative 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 11-15 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 mem-
bership.  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, cheap-sided 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 imp-
eratives.  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-cor-
poratist 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 sphere--why 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 work-
ers, 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 dis-
employed 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.  Forms of justice vary across class and racial lines. 
     This variation tends to reproduce the structures of power
     and privilege.

     2.  Most of the policing capacity of the U.S. is focused
     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 law-making 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 rule-making,
     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 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 com-
petitive, 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 papers,
I have tried to summarize the major assumptions of a Critical
theory of crime.  In this paper, 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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