Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice

Abstract

Editors' Introduction The following English translation of Georg Rusche's Arbeitsmarkt und Strafvolzug (1933) appears in print for the first time in Crime and Social Justice. Originally submitted as a research proposal to the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in 1931, Rusche's article laid the foundation for the book, Punishment and Social Structure, which he later coauthored with Otto Kirchheimer. First published in 1939 by Columbia University Press, the book was reissued in 1968 by Russell and Russell Company. Punishment and Social Structure continues to be neglected by American criminologists. Barnes and Teeters (New Horizons in Criminology, Prentice-Hall, 1943) and Edwin Sutherland (Principles of Criminology, 4th Edition, 1947) are the only two older textbooks that acknowledge its existence. Although Sutherland merely listed the work as suggested reading, Barnes and Teeters at least recognized the importance of the book: a stimulating and provocative work on the subject, Rusche and Kirchheimer have given us a clear idea of how changing social and economic systems fundamentally altered the ways of thinking and acting in relation to crime and punishment. The only American criminologist to employ the thesis developed in Punishment and Social Structure was Thorsten Sellin in Pioneering in Penology (1944) and in his most recent work, Slavery and the Penal System (1976). (See the review essay of Sellin's writings by Greg Shank in Punishment and Penal Discipline, 1980.) Sellin was also familiar with Rusche's Arbeitsmarkt und Strafvollzug (see Sellin's Research Memorandum on Crime in the Depression, Social Science Research Council, Bulletin 27,1937). In a review essay of Punishment and Social Structure in Crime and Social Justice 9 (Spring-Summer 1978), Dario Melossipoints out how Rusche's writings in Chapters II through VIII, which carefully follow the hypothesis laid down in Arbeitsmarkt und Strafvollzug, were reworked by Otto Kirchheimer. Rusche was less than enthusiastic about what had been done to his portion of the book. For this reason, Crime and Social Justice decided to print an English translation of how Rusche originally viewed his plan of research. This English translation is almost a faithful reproduction from the original German. We have, however, modernized the language and idioms without fundamentally altering the original meaning. It is apparent that Rusche was embarking on a radically new kind of analysis and, therefore, his vocabulary and categories of analysis are sometimes unclear and tentative. I. The study of crime and crime control is a fruitful field for sociological research. We are dealing with phenomena here that are determined to a large extent by social forces. Consequently, on the one hand, they practically compel an explanation derived from social relationships; on the other hand, they lend themselves especially well to an illumination of these relationships. The reason for this is that mystification and cover-up, which make the investigation of other social interconnections so very difficult, are to a great extent forced aside by the brutality of these phenomena and by conflicts that must necessarily be fought in the open. Surprisingly, research has made only minimal use of the possibilities offered here. Sociological considerations have been included extensively in the examination of criminological problems. However, they have not been done justice in any way. For, even if the relationship between socioeconomic phenomena and the problems of crime and crime control are obvious to sociologists, there is still a long way to go from the naive recognition of this fact to making use of it in a systematic and scientific fashion. This failure is explained by the fact that, in general, the researchers who devote themselves to criminological problems are not familiar with the fundamental principles of the social sciences, but approach them more from the outside. …