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WE HAVE BEEN WAITING A LONG TIME FOR A NEW EDITION OF GEORG RUSCHE and Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure (P&SS). In 1968, Russell and Russell reissued the original 1939 Columbia University Press edition - 35 years ago. When P&SS first appeared in 1939, it earned "esteem," and many prominent criminologists of the time acknowledged the book or reviewed it (Levy and Zander, 1994: 42-43). However, war broke out and captured everyone's attention. Almost 30 years later, a fortunate decision by Russell and Russell to republish the book encountered a very different destiny. In 1968, a wide audience of college students and scholars were about to welcome a book on a topic that was "hot" at the time, after Erving Goffman' s (1961) scathing criticism of "total institutions" had gone around the globe. Punishment and Social Structure became, to friend and foe alike, the bona fide Marxist view on punishment.1 We know that the high echelons of the Frankfurt School deemed P&SS to be "Marxist" enough to raise concerns about how American academia would react to it,2 given that it was the first English publication of the Frankfurt School on American soil. Moreover, Rusche's "curriculum" of studies and research was inspired by social-democratic economism, where the main explanatory factor was labor economics rather than labor struggle.3 Nonetheless, Rusche and Kirchheimer's book was "discovered" by the very few programmatically "neo-Marxist" efforts of the 1970s. One was the work of Ivan Jankovic, whose interests may have derived from the lively Marxist heterodoxy of Yugoslavian culture at the time; his Ph.D. dissertation work at U.C. Santa Barbara under the supervision of Donald R. Cressey undoubtedly influenced his encounter with Rusche and Kirchheimer.4 Other authors of a neo-Marxist persuasion were David Greenberg (1977) in New York and Dario Melossi (1976, 1977) in Bologna and Berkeley.5
Therefore, the book was mainly rediscovered in the United States. In my opinion, P&SS's "American" fortunes derived especially from two elements. The first was the particular strain of American "critical criminology" that, in the early 1970s, had a stronghold in the U.C. Berkeley School of Criminology and in the journals published there, first Issues in Criminology and from 1974 onward, especially Crime and Social Justice. After the closing of the School in 1974...