Punishment and Social Structure (1939), a book written by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution. It represents the 'most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition’ and ‘succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written' (Garland 1990: 89, 110). It is a central text in radical criminology, and an influential work in criminological conflict theory, cited as a foundation text in several major textbooks (Oxford Handbook of Criminology 2007; Newburn 2007; Innes 2003). It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual (Jacobs 1977: