Radical criminology has been the subject of considerable interest within American criminology in recent years. The term is associated with a number of theorists, including Richard Quinney, Herman Schwendinger, Tony Platt, William Chambliss, and Paul Takagi.' But the content of radical criminology is less familiar to nonradical criminologists, due in part to the extent of the divergence of radical criminology from other branches of the field. In particular, some confusion exists concerning the distinction between radical and conflict criminology, where conflict criminology is associated with the works of theorists such as George Vold and Austin Turk, as well as with earlier works of several theorists who later became radical criminologists, such as Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime and Chambliss and Seidman's Law, Order, and Power.2 The confusion between these two perspectives is related to the fact that most American radical criminologists considered themselves conflict criminologists about ten years ago. The confusion also results because the two perspectives partially share the same intellectual heritage in the works of Karl Marx, and that Marxism, to which radical