NCJ Number
91444
Journal
Crime and Social Justice Issue: 19 Dated: (Summer 1983) Pages: 2-12
Date Published
1983
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Following a critical response to Gross's article charging the Left with being bereft of a challenge to Rightist control of anticrime policy, this article identifies particular areas where the Left can apply its values in addressing crime patterns, with particular attention to the Australian context.
Abstract
Although Gross is correct in concluding that the Left is without a policy for combatting violent crime immediately, he fails to offer constructive proposals about how to mount a progressive approach to crime control nor does he address why and how the Right has succeeded in enlisting broad-based support for its anticrime policies. The Left in Australia, Britain, and America has failed to counter the Right's control of public policy in dealing with crime. The Left must rework the class versus class contradiction in the direction of a more popular-democratic-libertarian climate that will elicit broad-based support for progressive anticrime measures. Some crime areas appropriate for a progressive focus are offenses against the health and safety of the worker in the workplace, domestic violence, 'street crime' as based often in the injustices of economic exploitation, and tax evasion. These targeted crime areas deal respectively with corporate and government cooperation in crime that injures and kills workers, the need for alternative social networks that provide escape from intolerably violent family members, the need to revise socioeconomic institutions to address the causes of crime, and the need to attack ruling-class crime. Thirty-seven references are provided.