Originally published thirty years ago, Critique of the Legal Order remains highly relevant for the twenty-first century. Here Richard Quinney provides a critical look at the legal order in capitalist society. Using a traditional Marxist perspective, he argues that the legal order is not intended to reduce crime and suffering, but to maintain class differences and a social order that mainly benefits the ruling class. Quinney challenges modern criminologists to examine their own positions. As "ancillary agents of power," criminologists provide information that governing elites use to manipulate and control those who threaten the system. Quinney's original and thorough analysis of "crime control bureaucracies" and the class basis of such bureaucracies anticipates subsequent research and theorizing about the "crime control industry," a system that aims at social control of marginalized populations, rather than elimination of the social conditions that give rise to crime. He forcefully argues that technology applied to a "war against crime," together with academic scholarship, is used to help maintain social order to benefit a ruling class. Quinney also suggests alternatives. Anticipating the work of Noam Chomsky, he suggests we must first overcome a powerful media that provides a "general framework" that serves as the "boundary of expression." Chomsky calls this the manufacture of consent by providing necessary illusions. Quinney calls for a critical philosophy that enables us to transcend the current order and seek an egalitarian socialist order based upon true democratic principles. This core study for criminologists should interest those with a critical perspective on contemporary society.

Originally published thirty years ago, Critique of the Legal Order remains highly relevant for the twenty-first century. Here Richard Quinney provides a critical look at the legal order in capitalist society. Using a traditional Marxist perspective, he argues that the legal order is not intended to reduce crime and suffering, but to maintain class differences and a social order that mainly benefits the ruling class.

Quinney challenges modern criminologists to examine their own positions. As "ancillary agents of power," criminologists provide information that governing elites use to manipulate and control those who threaten the system. Quinney's original and thorough analysis of "crime control bureaucracies" and the class basis of such bureaucracies anticipates subsequent research and theorizing about the "crime control industry," a system that aims at social control of marginalized populations, rather than elimination of the social conditions that give rise to crime. He forcefully argues that technology applied to a "war against crime," together with academic scholarship, is used to help maintain social order to benefit a ruling class.

Quinney also suggests alternatives. Anticipating the work of Noam Chomsky, he suggests we must first overcome a powerful media that provides a "general framework" that serves as the "boundary of expression." Chomsky calls this the manufacture of consent by providing necessary illusions. Quinney calls for a critical philosophy that enables us to transcend the current order and seek an egalitarian socialist order based upon true democratic principles. This core study for criminologists should interest those with a critical perspective on contemporary society.

Criminology has traditionally been a military science, a science of war. "The criminal element" is the enemy. Repression and restraint are the primary tools of criminal justice, and criminologists study how to make those tools effective in the "war on crime." We are beginning to realize that this is a war against ourselves and one that we are losing. Our inability to make peace with crime and criminals is reflected in the paucity of our daily personal relations, where we live by domination and discipline, where forgiveness and mercy are seen as naive surrender to victimization.

The essays in this volume propose peacemaking as an effective alternative to the "war" on crime. They range from studies of the intellectual roots of the peacemaking tradition to concrete examples of peacemaking in the community, with special attention to feminist peacemmaking traditions and women's experience.

Featuring both scholarly and autobiographical writings, Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice follows Richard Quinney's development as a criminologist. Quinney's criminology is a critical criminology which he describes as a journey of witnessing to crime and social justice. Quinney's travels from the 1960s through the 1990s show a progression of ways of thinking and acting: from the social constructionist perspective to phenomenology, from phenomenology to Marxist and critical philosophy, from Marxist and critical philosophy to liberation theology, from liberation theology to Buddhism and existentialism. Along this journey, Quinney adopts a more ethnographic and personal mode of thinking and being. Each new stage of development incorporates what has preceded it; each change has been motivated by the need to understand crime and social justice in another or more complex way, in a way excluded from a former understanding. Each stage has also incorporated changes that were taking place in Quinney's personal life. Ultimately, there is no separation between life and theory, between witnessing and writing.

Lyrical, contemplative, and unique, this is not a book about sociology but rather a deeply personal book written by a sociologist. The emphasis is on an existential view of the here-and-now of human existence; thus, the process of the writing and the reading of the book itself, the relationship of a