At a Crossroads.

• Date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Platt, Tony
• Published date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Platt, Tony

I very much appreciate that Social Justice, the journal with which I have been associated since its founding in 1974, is devoting this symposium to my latest and no doubt last book. I was encouraged to write Beyond These Walls by the resurgence of anticarceral struggles during the Obama years. I hope it contributes to a dialogue between contemporary activists and my generation of activists, who came of age in an era that, in the words of Alice Walker (1967, 554), gave us "hope for tomorrow" and "called us to life."

My thanks to Michelle Brown, Craig Gilmore, David Stein, and Valeria Vegh Weis for seriously engaging the book's emphasis on praxis and for appreciating that ideas matter. I am encouraged to see a revitalization of what we used to call radical criminology, this time with new ideas and research emerging from a much wider variety of intellectual disciplines: geography, criminology, law and society, sociology, women's and ethnic studies, and history. What is too often missing from carceral studies--my own work included--is a global and comparative perspective. I share Mike Davis's (2020) concern that "there's a disturbing element of national solipsism in the progressive movement."

This tendency to minimize global issues is evident in the current long moment of the coronavirus pandemic. As I write at the beginning of May 2020, there are more than three million reported cases in the world, with the United States accounting for one third and its death toll approaching 60,000. By the...