A New Edition of "Punishment and Social Structure" Thirty-Five Years Later: A Timely

Event
Author(s): Dario Melossi
Source: Social Justice, Vol. 30, No. 1 (91), Race, Security & Social Movements (2003), pp.
248-263
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
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A New Edition of Punishment and
Social Structure Thirty-Five Years
Later: A Timely Event
Dario Melossi

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 Uni?
versity 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 explana?
tory 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

Dario Melossi is a Professor in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Bologna, Italy (e
mail: [email protected]). He is a co-author of The Prison and the Factory (1977) and author of
The State of Social Control (1990). He has published many articles on the theory of law, the state, and
social control. His latest research focuses on the current building of a European polity, with particular
attention to issues of social control and social exclusion. This article is a revised version of sections
from his "Introduction" to the new Transaction edition of Punishment and Social Structure (Rusche
and Kirchheimer, 2003). Readers should refer to it for an update on Georg Rusche's biography.

Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003) 248

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 249

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 and
the academic Diaspora to which its members were obliged ? with the single
exception of its most senior member, Paul Takagi, who had already obtained
tenure at Berkeley?Crime and Social Justice became the rallying point of critical
criminology in the United States and the natural American correspondent of
critical criminology worldwide.6 Between 1976 and 1980, Crime and Social
Justice published a translation of Rusche's 1930 and 1933 pieces, an English
version of my "Introduction" to the Italian translation of P&SS (Melossi, 1978),
the 1980 piece in which I reconstructed the sparse biographical information about
Georg Rusche, until then completely unknown (Melossi, 1980), and two articles
by Ivan Jankovic (1977,1978), in which he "tested" Rusche's hypothesis or, what
would later become famous as "Rusche and Kirchheimer's hypothesis."

The uRusche and Kirchheimer Hypothesis"

The "Rusche and Kirchheimer hypothesis" consists in the idea that there
should be a direct positive relationship between changing imprisonment rates and
changing unemployment rates. This idea was apparently easy to "operationalize"
and overlapped well ? bringing us to the second element that explains Punish?
ment and Social Structure's American fortune ? with the growing interest in
quantitative research within American sociology (and, specifically, borrowing
from econometric techniques such as time series analysis). In Rusche and
Kirchheimer's budding "tradition," this line of inquiry was pioneered by Ivan
Jankovic (1977) and David Greenberg (1977). This first appeared in an exchange
with views held by Alfred Blumstein and collaborators (1973,1977), who, instead
of working on the assumption of "exogenous" causes of change in imprisonment
rates, moved from the "Durkheimian" idea of an "endogenous" mechanism or a
"stability" or "homeostatic" hypothesis.
It is impossible here to reconstruct a detailed history of all the studies that took
P&SS's argument in this quantitative direction. A very useful piece by Chiricos
and DeLone (1992) took stock of this literature, albeit only up to 1992. This
literature came mainly from the U.S., but also had contributions from the U.K.
(especially Steve Box and Chris Hale's work), France (Bernard Laffargue and
Thierry Godefroy), and Italy (Dario Melossi). The debate did not stop there,
however, and other interesting contributions have appeared more recently
(D'Alessio and Stolzenberg, 1995,2002; Jacobs and Helms, 1996; Sutton, 2000,

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 250 Melossi

2001; Weiss, 2001; and Western and Beckett, 1999, to name a few). Under
pressure from an increasing dissatisfaction with the more orthodox variants of
Marxism that defined the 1970s period, Rusche's hypothesis was reframed in an
increasingly less instrumental fashion and was instead characterized in social
symbolic, cultural, and political terms, as in the work by Box and Hale, Melossi,
Jacobs, Sutton, and Western and Beckett.
Despite the respect earned by this quite considerable body of work, which has
acquired an autonomy and raison d'etre of its own,7 we must ask whether working
with measures such as the size of the unemployed population and the size of the
imprisoned population ? however refined and complex the models in which they
are inserted ? is a good way to "test" Rusche's original hypothesis. Indeed,
Rusche did not come to any conclusion about the size of the prison population. The
two related hypotheses that can be drawn directly from his theoretical and
historical reconstruction state that in periods when the market is flooded with
labor, conditions of life within prisons decline accordingly, as do wages and the
general standard of living of the working class, whereas in periods when labor is
scarce and therefore valuable, conditions of life in prison tend to become
increasingly better, work is introduced, and there is greater recourse to forced
labor, which was first introduced in 17th-century mercantilist policies. Under such
conditions, punishment, and specifically imprisonment, is used to break the
resistance of the working class outside, where the favorable conditions of the labor
market translate into wage gains and an increase in the capacity of the working
class for organization, higher demands, and general resistance to exploitation.
The most recent research on the "Rusche and Kirchheimer hypothesis"
generally demonstrates the difficulty in finding a straightforward relationship
between the size of the unemployed and imprisoned populations ? especially if
one extends analysis to a much-needed comparative dimension (Sutton, 2001;
Melossi, 2001). Developments in the United States in the last 20 years or so are also
usually mentioned to contradict Rusche and Kirchheimer's hypothesis, because in
that instance a cyclically oscillating unemployment rate does not seem to have had
anything in common with a vertically increasing imprisonment rate (one that is
exceptional at a global level). For that reason, in my analysis of the emergence of
the "great American internment" during the crucial period of capitalist reorgani?
zation in the United States between the oil energy crisis in 1973 and the early 1990s
? when the U.S. economy finally took off again8 ? I claimed that we should not
speak so much of unemployment as of the "pressure to perform" placed on the
working class (Melossi, 1993). In those roughly 20 years, if it is true that the
unemployment rate was on average higher than in the previous period, the most
dramatic changes developed in the decline in hourly wages (Peterson, 1994), in the
level of inequality, which increased spectacularly (Kovandzic, Vieraitis, and
Yeisley, 1998), and in the great increases in work force participation and total
hours worked, especially by women (Schor, 1991). It is as if, sometime in the mid

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 251

1970s, the "social system" in the United States started to squeeze the working class
for the juice of production, with two hands instead of one. Following the logic of
Rusche's analysis, a consequence of the increased level of performance demanded
of the American working class would be a lowering of the threshold of "less
eligibility" and greater pressure to perform at the general social behavioral level,
resulting in many more (punished) infractions of the law, as well as more severe
punishments ? all of which occurred in the U.S. between the early 1970s and the
early 1990s.
Why did this not happen, or at least to the same degree, in Europe, where "post
Fordist" transformations also started to unfold? Recent discussions in the sociol?
ogy of punishment have been moving in a comparative direction (Sutton, 2000,
2001; Melossi, 2001; Savelsberg, 1999). The results, e.g., from John Sutton's
comparative analysis of a group of "advanced" countries, are not inconsistent with
the position highlighted above. Sutton (2001) found that the relationship between
labor surplus and prison growth may be overstated, especially in a comparative
perspective, but an element generally associated with what we could call a
"structural restraint" on imprisonment is the strength of unions. This comes as no
surprise to those aware of the longstanding position of unions vis-?-vis prison
labor, especially in the United States, a type of labor that is considered to be forced
labor and therefore unfairly competitive with free labor. However, beyond that,
Sutton's results seem to speak to the kernel of Rusche's thesis, contained in the
"less eligibility" principle. The idea of less eligibility is mired in classic political
economy; it is the idea according to which the living conditions of the working
class are a "dependent variable" of the labor market. Among such conditions is the
management of crime using penality ? linked to the labor market by means of the
concept of deterrence. Rusche's "model" is in fact a strictly "liberal" one, in which
market forces rule uncontested, but this reflected the historical reality of the
periods he studied most intensely. In the course of the 20th century, however, as
Rusche pointed out in his 1930 and 1933 articles (through an argument that the
legal theorist Kirchheimer failed to develop), such a view became progressively
less realistic. This was exemplified by Rusche's comparison of the softening
effects of social-policy legislation on prison conditions in Germany, during the
Depression years, vis-?-vis what happened instead in the United States. The
strength of the working class ? measured through the power of the unions and the
creation of social legislation sponsored and backed by unions ? tends therefore
to have a moderating effect on the "free," cyclical unfolding of imprisonment and
the market.
Rusche claimed that because such economic arguments constitute an
unsurpassable limit to the possibility of penal reform,9 one must understand the
mechanism by which the two are connected, i.e., the idea that the "value" of a
human being in a market society is dependent upon the value of labor. In fact, as
Marx had famously written in the 1844 Manuscripts,

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 252 Melossi

political economy [...] does not recognize the unoccupied worker, the
workingman, in so far as he happens to be outside this labor relationship.
The cheat-thief, swindler, beggar, and unemployed; the starving, wretched,
and criminal workingman ? these are figures who do not exist for
political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge,
the grave digger, and bumbailiff, etc.; such figures are specters outside
its domain (Marx, 1844: 120-121).

Instead, inside the domain of political economy is the value of labor. The value
of a human being is therefore the value of his labor.10 The strength of working
class organizing, however ? which appears in Sutton's analysis under the guise
of union power ? is directed against such a stark view. The objective of that
strength is the independent determination, through class struggle, of the value of
human beings over the one determined by the market. This is so much the case that,
at the outset of working-class organizing, many legal systems considered early
forms of unions and union actions as tantamount to (criminal) "conspiracies"
against the functioning of the "natural law" of the market (Mensch, 1982).
Such "class struggle," if it appears in similar forms wherever a comparable
"mode of production" is found, is embedded within a physical and a social world
that is at least partly autonomous from that mode of production, a "lifeworld" that
the mode of production continuously attempts to "colonize."11 The conditions,
including "cultural" conditions, under which the main mechanisms of modernity
(capitalism, the forms of industrial production, and imprisonment) are set in
motion, differ profoundly from society to society ? and even among "modern"
societies themselves! This dimension is foreign to Rusche's analysis, but it can
hardly be overlooked. Perhaps, following D?rkheim's (1900) famous distinction,
one could distinguish between the "quality" and "quantity" of punishment.
Bending D?rkheim's terms to a slightly different usage, one could hypothesize
that whereas the "quality" of punishment ? i.e., the specific historical forms that
punishment assumes ? tends to move in similar ways through the development
of the modern world, albeit through unavoidable "gaps" in time, the "quantity" of
punishment can hardly be predicted in ways that are independent from rather
idiosyncratic cultural traditions and political contingencies. Specific religious and
political traditions, as well as the official acceptance of violence in the resolution
of conflict by governments ? as argued by authors who postulate a "brutalization
theory" (Archer and Gartner, 1984) ? will hardly be uninfluential on the
unfolding of punishment (Melossi, 2001; Savelsberg, 2002).

Le "Grand Livre" de Rusche et Kirchheimer12

It is worth noting the homage paid to Rusche and Kirchheimer's work by

Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975a), the book that was to become
the major reference point of the cultural debate on punishment (and much more).13

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 253

In one of the very few references to secondary literature in Discipline and Punish,
Foucault describes Rusche and Kirchheimer's work as "great" because it "pro?
vides a number of essential reference points" (Ibid.). Specifically, this is the case
for Rusche's starting point, i.e., the grounding of the study of punishment not in
philosophical and legal theories and ideas, but in historically concrete practices of
punishment. Significantly, the final section of the first chapter of Discipline and
Punish begins with an homage to Rusche and Kirchheimer and proceeds to outline
some of Foucault's most crucial concepts, such as those of the "political economy
of the body" and the "microphysics of power."
This seems to me to be further proof, were there need for one, of the "family
resemblance" of Foucauldian theory and a Marx-informed view on crime and
punishment ? that is, if one goes to the heart of Marxist theory, the connection
between exploitation and work discipline. At its core, it is even more explicit than
Rusche's treatment, whose interest, closer to the tradition of market economics,
was centered in the concept of the labor market rather than in what Marx used to
call "the sphere of production." Certain passages from the third part of Foucault's
Discipline and Punish, entitled "Discipline," sound at times like quotes from
Capital, and the central idea of a "productive" power sounds familiar to Marxist
theory, almost a generalization of it. "Discipline" represents the linchpin that ties
the place of production to the modern place of punishment in a way that is wholly
derivative from Marx, and parallel to Foucault's (Melossi and Pavarini, 1977).14

"Rusche and Kirchheimer's Hypothesis" and Totalitarianism

A criticism that may be leveled against Rusche's original hypothesis, and the
line of work somehow inspired by it, is the absence of reflection on ambits that
differ from capitalist societies ? in particular, the lack of "reflexivity" on the
heavy presence of imprisonment and forced labor in countries once defined as
"socialist." This would be quite ironic for a position that is often portrayed as
representing a "Marxist" standpoint. Indeed, there are interesting hints in Rusche's
work of the direction his analysis could have taken, also with regard to "socialist"
countries. Rusche's interest in "coercive labor" was another aspect that Kirchheimer
failed to develop later. The point of departure in Rusche's analysis, especially
concerning imprisonment, is the Mercantilist period when, faced with a lack or
scarcity of labor power, European absolutism devised various policies to "put
people to work." One was the "invention" of the proto-prison, the Ur-Prison
known as "the workhouse."
Policies of coercive labor have accompanied the development of capitalism
ever since, even if they have not been the policies "of choice" of capitalism, whose
norm seems to be the much more malleable and flexible instrument of the free
labor market. Slavery and slave labor have therefore been disappearing from the
general picture of capitalist development, except for particular times and periods.
Thorsten Sellin's (1976: vii) reconstruction of the relationship between the

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254 Melossi

institution of slavery and the penal system ? derived from Gustav Radbruch's
(1938) idea that slavery constituted the historical origin of punishment?was one
of the research efforts most clearly marked, from its opening pages, by Rusche and
Kirchheimer's work. Furthermore, Rusche believed that the contemporary (to
him) situation of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany could lend itself to being
analyzed along similar lines. In 1939, in a letter to Max Horkheimer in New York,
Rusche stated that he was ready to write an article for the Institute's journal on "the
most recent development of German penal policy." His view, contrary to the more
legalistic version penned by Kirchheimer, was that "the unbelievable scarcity of
workers" caused in Germany "truly interesting new phenomena." It is not clear
whether Rusche had in mind the emerging forced labor camps. Years before, in
1934, while revising the manuscript of his book in London, Rusche apparently
wished to extend his discussion to the cases of Russia and India. In Russia, he saw
the determining factor to be the scarcity characterizing the workforce, leading to
an extensive use of coercive labor (Levy and Zander, 1994: 16, 66).
Indeed, Rusche's remarks could be extended to the particular conditions of
Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. The "first country in the world to be ruled
by the working-class" emerged from the war, famine, and embargo without a
working class to speak of. The first objective of Soviet rulers, therefore, whether
in Lenin's "soft" version of the New Economic Policy, or later in Stalin's "hard"
version of the Five-Year Plan, was the reconstruction of industry and the working
class. Forced labor appeared especially in the 1930s with Stalin's campaigns of
forced collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization of the country,
and lasted at least until the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956.
I would submit that, consistent with Rusche's general overview, one could
characterize those years as a compressed and accelerated period of "primitive
accumulation" that unfolded across decades instead of centuries, as had been the
case in Western Europe. It employed similar instruments, including coercive labor
and penal servitude. Thus, using Rusche's hypothesis to understand the events of
"realized socialism" proves to be far from impossible. Indeed, Rusche's "simple
heuristic maxim" (1933: 7) is particularly viable for understanding the events of
totalitarian societies between the two world wars.

The "Rusche and Kirchheimer Hypothesis " and the Imprisonment of Women

The argument that Rusche and Kirchheimer ignored another crucial aspect of
imprisonment, i.e., the imprisonment of women, has more merit. Such forgetful
ness is indeed a bit awkward given that, especially in the writing and blueprints of
all reformers, beginning with the usual 17th-century mercantilist policies of the
workhouse, the separation of men and women and the consequent construction of
specific institutions for women usually loomed large. The most obvious reasons
for this lack of consideration probably lies in the "marginal" role usually attributed
to such institutions within a penality patterned after male actors, given the actual

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 255

numerical relevance of men within penitentiary institutions.15 One could argue

that when we discuss "social control," what is left unsaid about women concerns
much more the "outside" than the "inside" of prisons, in the sense that the type of
social control reserved for women, in reflecting the patriarchal structure of society,
has been more "domestic" than "penal." To hazard a slight generalization, one
could state that, whereas for men criminalized ? and penalized ? behavior
corresponds to what we might call an "exaggeration" of male characteristics, for
women the opposite is true. It is the negation of what is traditionally constructed
as "female characteristics" that brings women into the sphere of penalization: in
becoming more "similar to men," they essentially exercise autonomy from
patriarchal and familial structures. In this connection, the relationship of gender
to class and ethnic markers also comes to the fore, as demonstrated by Nicole
Rafter's (1985: 157-175) work on the history of women's reformatories in the
United States, where the correction of "the rebels" had, as its end, the instantiation
of proper, middle-class "womanhood."

"Long Cycles" of Punishment?

Finally, I would suggest that probing deeply into the "long cycle" or "long
wave" perspective advanced by liberal socioeconomic thinkers and Marxists
might most productively develop the research tradition initiated by Georg Rusche.
In this view, that which is most significant in international socioeconomic
development, whether in terms of technological innovation and/or class conflicts,
occurs in long cycles of roughly 50 years, with the cycle's peaks and troughs
separated by periods of about 25 years (very close to the span of a generation). This
historical-economic concept seems to be more readily employed to understand
phenomena of an essentially cultural nature ? for instance, those of penality, that
tend to be characterized by a slow and viscous movement ? in contrast to more
straightforward "economic" movements that are better captured by the usual
concept of the "short" business cycle.16
Why should this view connect with the substance, if not the letter, of Rusche
and Kirchheimer's analysis? Once again, the labor market furnishes the linkage.
In the long-cyclical view, movements in the cycle are induced by the efforts of
actors in the economic arena ? essentially entrepreneurs and workers, with "the
state," i.e., political actors, as a third party playing an increasingly important role
in adjudicating conflicts between the first two. Each of these actors tries to
overcome the limitations imposed on its development and "freedom" by the
adverse activities of the other. Innovation would therefore constitute a crucial tool
by which entrepreneurs undercut the power of labor in situations where a
prolonged spell of prosperity placed labor in a privileged position. The result of
innovation ? usually backed by coercive power ? is to destructure and disorga?
nize those economic arrangements that made it possible for the working class to
achieve power. Likewise, after adapting to innovation, the reconfigured working

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256 Melossi

class recruited under the new conditions ? often from "lowly" "immigrant"
quarters ? slowly finds a way to reorganize and bring ever more effective blows
to "the profit margins." With this new setting of social relationships and power, the
cycle starts anew, similar to the preceding one in pattern, though completely
different phenomenologically.
Rusche's linkage of punishment ? especially imprisonment ? and the labor
market can be construed as one slowly moving aspect within such a broader
framework: imprisonment rises, and conditions within prisons become harsher in
periods when the entrepreneurial elite is on the attack in response to the "intoler?
able" levels of power attained by the working class. After the reestablishment of
entrepreneurial hegemony, when the working class is in turn slowly reconstructing
its power and organization, imprisonment again begins to decline and conditions
of penality become more prone to "reform." Such connections should not be
thought of as an "understructure" that determines a "superstructure." Rather, they
should be conceived of in a manner similar to Max Weber's approach: a network
of relations of affinity, where long-cyclical movements are caused by the autono?
mous but interactive contributions?economic, political, and cultural?of all the
actors involved.
In trying to develop this line of analysis, Charlotte Vanneste (2001: 56)
identified the historical location of the "peaks" and "troughs" of long cycles.17 The
peaks are of paramount importance: around the peak, a long spell of prosperity
ends and turns into an "economic crisis." Prosperity, from the standpoint of the
working class, means power, stronger organization, and a robust capacity for wage
demands. From the entrepreneurs' perspective, the strength of the working class
translates into rapidly diminishing profit margins and the necessity for change and
innovation. Innovation is often the result of a common and truly hegemonic feeling
that the boundaries of the "old" social system are too rigid and suffocating for the
kind of development a long period of prosperity has made possible. By innovating,
the most enterprising sectors of the elite are able to sidestep long-established
competitors, together with the type of working class that grew with prosperity ?
and, most important in terms of class conflict, to smash the given organizational
forms of the "old" working class.
During the period of prosperity leading to the "peak" years when the "show?
down" between labor and capital takes place, punishment has become less of a
"necessity" for the social system as a whole. When most people who look for work
can find it, the general social attitude, according to Rusche, is one of a good
disposition even toward the lowest members of the working class. There is the
expectation that even if left to himself in a condition of freedom, the first-time
offender will be able to be reintegrated into society and find a source of income.
Those who have committed a crime can be rehabilitated through a short prison stint
or through some "alternatives to imprisonment"; only the most callous criminals
will be thought of as deserving long spells of detention. Furthermore, prison

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 257

conditions will be decent, and it will be possible to work within the prison system,
both because this is deemed to be a good tool for rehabilitation and because the
high wages outside make it worthwhile to produce at least certain goods at
"controlled" prices (something to which the unions outside often tend to object).
Furthermore, the basic stability of periods of prosperity means that no "strangers"
have to be called into work, and even if they are, the general climate of tolerance
and the good disposition of society extend to them as well.
The opposite happens in the following period. The defeat of the "old" working
class, as well as of the least competitive economic sectors, translates into a
progressive devaluation of human beings and increased recourse, especially
around the "peak," to a "new" kind of working class ? youth, women, and
immigrants ? that does not share the values and general "ethos" of the old one,
leading to strong resentments, conflicts, and, most important, divisions within the
working class.18 The unemployed increase in number, "crime" is often associated
with "newcomers," tolerance disappears, prison work and "alternative programs"
are shelved, and a general mean spirit of envy and revanche takes hold in a society
increasingly structured around lines of hierarchy, authoritarianism, and exclusion.
If we accept that it is possible to "measure" all of this using imprisonment rates
as an indicator ? which, although unsatisfactory, is the only one available ? it
may be useful to compare, if only suggestively, the predicted "slope" of the "long
cycle" model, according to Vanneste, with the actual behavior of imprisonment
rates in Italy and the United States (see Figure 1). According to Vanneste's
reconstruction, the peaks would be located grosso modo around 1870,1920, and
1970, and the troughs around 1850, 1895, and 1945. Because, according to the
hypothesis, the imprisonment rate should "behave" in counter-cyclical fashion,
we would predict an increase in imprisonment rates in the three "downswings,"
1870-1895,1920-1945, and 1970-2000, and a decrease in the three "upswings,"
1850-1870,1895-1920, and 1945-1970. Today, we would find ourselves on the
brink of a new decrease.
The axes in Figure 1 correspond to the "peaks" and "troughs." The behavior
of imprisonment rates seems to roughly correspond to the predicted one only for
the 20th century, i.e., the last two "long cycles," but not for the previous one in the
19th century. We distinguished above between an argument based on "quality"
and one based on "quantity." Whereas we may be able to predict the general
direction of the slope, the specificity of the size of incremental change year by year
may vary greatly in different countries and under different circumstances. If we
compare rates in the U.S. and Italy in the 1895 to 1920 period, we see a strong
decline in Italy, but only a slight one in the U.S. In the years of the ensuing
Depression, we see a moderate increase in the U.S. and simply an interruption of
the previous downward trend in Italy. After World War II, we again see a definite
declining trend in Italy and a substantially stable situation in the U.S. Italian rates
edge up a little after 1970, amid oscillations, while in the U.S. we witness the

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258 Melossi

already mentioned "great internment" of the last quarter of the 20th-century. At the
very least, one should note that the "long cycles" should here be negotiated with
a "secular trend" (Schumpeter, 1939:1; 193-219) that is strongly declining in the
case of Italy and strongly increasing in the case of the U.S.

Figure 1: Imprisonment Mates per 100,000 in the U.S. and Italy19

500

1850 60 70 80 90 1900 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

I believe that this last exercise is a good indication of the value of Rusche's
hypothesis, especially if it is applied over the dimension that makes the most sense,
i.e., long-term development. There is no doubt that ? as Sellin and Sutherland
stated when they were first asked to read Rusche's original manuscript ?
Rusche's hypothesis must be negotiated with many other aspects of social reality
and especially with the specificity of each country's history. However, the
"heuristic maxim" that an "unusual human being," Georg Rusche, laid out at the
end of the 1920s probably represents the most elegant and parsimonious idea that
the social sciences have produced to help us understand the social and economic
context of developments in penality.

NOTES

1. Eventually certified by David Garland (1990: 83-110).

2. In particular, Franz Neumann ? who, as a member of the Direction of the Institute, would
approach Otto Kirchheimer for the rewrite of the manuscript ? asked Kirchheimer "not to advertise
on every page the superiority of Marxist theory" (Le\y and Zander, 1994:22,52).
3. People who knew him described him as an unabashed liberal. Whereas his educational

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Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later 259

curriculum is not inconsistent with that, a note dated December 1,1934, from the London "Society for
the Protection of Learning and Science" (which attempted to help refugees), reported that Rusche had
"prospects in the USSR." We may hypothesize that Rusche's political path ended in deep disillusion?
ment about socialism, which was very common among refugees after the war. That path was perhaps
most famously represented in the collection, The God That Failed (Crossman, 1950; see especially
Arthur Koestler's famous contribution).
4. Don Cressey had been Edwin H. Sutherland's student and later co-author (Sutherland and
Cressey, 1978). In the 1930s, Edwin Sutherland and Thorsten Sellin had been asked to read Rusche's
manuscript before publication. Jankovic's articles in Crime and Social Justice (Jankovic, 1977; 1978)
originated from his dissertation work with Cressey.
5. Since this is being said at a time in which to proclaim one's work ? even past work ?
"Marxist" or "neo-Marxist" is no longer a sign of distinction but of eccentricity at best, I am not afraid
of appearing immodest in stating this. At the time, I had derived the reference to P&SS not from any
criminological text, but from Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946). Dobb
had been among Rusche's supporters in the U.K. Levy and Zander (1994:43,fn. 118) report a statement
by Heinz Steinen according to which, at the end of the 1960s, the British "new criminologists" (I
assume Taylor, Walton, and Young) would have made "circuler sous le manteau dans les colloques"
the reference to Rusche and Kirchheimer's work. I doubt it. I think Steinen predates something that
would happen only later. The turning point in this respect might have been the Autorenkolloquium in
Bielefeld (November 1-3,1974), organized by Alessandro Baratta and Karl Schuman, about the newly
published The New Criminology (1973). There, I presented a draft of the essay that would be published
in Crime and Social Justice (Melossi, 1976). A reference to P&SS is nowhere to be found in The New
Criminology, which privileges a rather different kind of "young Marx" Marxism, and if Taylor,
Walton, and Young would have had it i(sous le manteau" they would have certainly drawn it out! Later
on, Ian Taylor especially, but also Jock Young, were exceptionally helpful and very kind on the British
side of my research on Georg Rusche's life, which appeared in Melossi (1980).
6. It was a truly international phenomenon, from the "National Deviancy Conference" in the
U.K., to the (still existing) "European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control" in Europe,
to the many journals in German, French, Italian, and Spanish in Europe and Latin America.
7. I tried to summarize at least part of the debate in Melossi (1998).
8. Many describe this period as one of transition from a "Fordist" to a "post-Fordist" economy.
For an attempt to connect the particular version of "post-Fordist" argument developed by Hardt and
Negri (2000) to the question of penal and social control, see De Giorgi (2002).
9. In their "Introduction" to the French edition, Levy and Zander (1994:60-72) make this point
very clearly.
10. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, E.B. Pashukanis (1924) made a rather similar point (see
Melossi, 1978).
11. Different versions of this account can be found in Habermas (1981) or in the Marxist
"imperialism" tradition (lastly Hardt and Negri, 2000).
12. From Foucault, Surveiller et punir (1975c: 29).
13. Levy and Zander (1994: 53-55) have shown, in a way overlooked by other commentators,
Foucault's debt to "Rusche and Kirchheimer's great work" (Foucault, 1975a: 24).
14. As Foucault stated at the time in an interview, almost paraphrasing Bertrand Russell's famous
quote about Christianity, the one who writes history today cannot help but call himself Marxist
(Foucault, 1975b). The relationship between the "Marxist tradition," Rusche and Kirchheimer, and
Foucault is certainly much richer, more complex, and fertile and nuanced than it appears in Garland's
treatment in Punishment and Modern Society (1990) (see Melossi, 1998: xii-xiv),
15. See, however, Feeley and Little's (1991) interesting contribution, which shows otherwise for
the period at the beginning of modernity.
16. Schumpeter, Pareto, Sorokin, Kondratieff , and Kalecki are the names most commonly linked
to some kind of cyclical theory of socioeconomic development (for a recent review, see Rennstich,

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 260 Melossi

2002). Melossi (1985) and Vanneste (2001) have explored the possibility of applying such views to
a Ruschean type of analysis.
17. Vanneste goes on to apply this theoretical framework to the case of Belgium.
18. History offers many examples of such deviant representations of "strangers/workers." One
has only to think of the "vagrants" that constituted the "original" proletariat in the process of
"primitive" accumulation (Marx, 1867; Melossi and Pavarini, 1977); of the "classes dangereuses" of
the 19th century (Chevalier, 1973); of the "hoboes" and the " wobblies" during the great transformation
of the North American working class in the early decades of last century (Anderson, 1923); of the mass
migration of former Southern and Eastern European peasants to the Americas around the turn of the
century, and the panic about their "criminality" (Teti, 1993; Salvatore and Aguirre, 1996); of the mass
migration of Afro-American rural workers from the South to the North of the United States between
the 1920s and the 1950s, which eventually fed what would be called the "American underclass" in more
recent years (Wilson, 1987); of the mass move of Southern Europeans, between the 1950s and early
1970s, toward Central and Northern Europe and, there too, the ensuing panic about crime (Ferracuti,
1968); the most recent example is probably the migration of Northern African and Eastern European
workers toward the countries of the European Union, this time also Southern Europe and also marked
by an outcry over the "criminal" invasion (Tonry, 1997; Marshall, 1997). In all these very different
examples, we witness a bifurcation in the "moral economy" of the working class between a respectable
"old" working class, expressing moral indignation at the mores of the newcomers, and a "new" working
class, the subject of extensive processes of criminalization. I have called this phenomenon the "cycle
of production of la canailler of the rabble, in my "Introduction" to De Giorgi (Melossi, 2002).
19. Italian data are my elaboration of data assembled by the official governmental institute of
statistics in Rome (1STAT). They go from 1863 to 1997 and are equal to the sum of inmates in all adult
prison institutions. U.S. data go from 1850 to 1997 and are equal to the sum of inmates in state and
federal prisons. They are based on an update of the data originally collected and elaborated by Margaret
Cahalan (1979) (the line between 1850 and 1925 is a linear interpolation based on the years for which
we have data, that is, 1850,1860,1870,1880,1890,1904,1910, and 1923). They do not include jail
data.

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