Donald Black was an American sociologist who was a university professor of the social sciences at the University of Virginia until his retirement in 2016. Black received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1968, and he taught at the law schools of both Yale and Harvard before moving to Virginia in 1985.
Like rational choice theory, conflict theory, or functionalism, pure sociology is a sociological paradigm — a strategy for explaining human behavior. Developed by Donald Black as an alternative to individualistic and social-psychological theories, pure sociology was initially used to explain variation in legal behavior. Since then, Black and other pure sociologists have used the strategy to explain terrorism, genocide, lynching, and other forms of conflict management as well as science, art, and religion.
Stuart Henry is professor emeritus, Criminal justice and former director of the School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University (2006–17). He has also been visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent's School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research from 2008 to 2013 and visiting research scholar in sociology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2017.
Andreas von Hirsch, before 2008 published under his anglicised name Andrew von Hirsch, is a legal philosopher and penal theorist and the founding Director of the centre for Penal Theory and Penal Ethics at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. He also has been Honorary Professor of Penal Theory and Penal Law at Cambridge University, and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
Lucia ZednerFBA is a British legal scholar. She is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology.
Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA is a British criminologist. He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
Robert Agnew is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology at Emory University and past president of the American Society of Criminology.
Vincenzo Ruggiero was an Italian-born sociologist who was Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University, London. He was also director of the Centre for Social and Criminological Research at Middlesex University. He died in London on 3 February 2024, at the age of 73. He is survived by his partner of 33 years, Cynthia, and daughter, Lucia.
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". 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. It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
Philip Thomas Bean is Emeritus professor of Criminology at Loughborough University, former President of the British Society of Criminology (1996–99) and an authority and author on the impact on society of drugs, mental illness and crime having published 62 works that are held in approximately 6,000 libraries around the world.
Valerie Jenness is an author, researcher, public policy advisor, and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Jenness is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and prior to that, was a senior visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Jenness served as dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015 and chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society from 2001-2006. Jenness is credited with conducting the first systemic study of transgender women in men's prisons.
Nicola Mary Lacey, is a British legal scholar who specialises in criminal law. Her research interests include criminal justice, criminal responsibility, and the political economy of punishment. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE). She was previously Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at LSE (1998–2010), and then Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (2010–2013).
Frances Mary Heidensohn is an academic sociologist and criminologist at the London School of Economics, who is acknowledged as a pioneer in feminist criminology. Her 1968 article The Deviance of Women: A Critique and An Enquiry was the first critique of conventional criminology from a feminist perspective.
Lesley McAra is Chair of Penology at the University of Edinburgh She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed a CBE in the New Year's Honours List 2018, for services to Criminology.
Victor Bailey is a British social and legal historian, author, editor and academic. Bailey is the Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kansas' Department of History since 2007, and the director of its Joyce & Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities for seventeen years from 2000 to 2017. He is credited with editing and authoring some of the best volumes in nineteenth century British history, criminal law, policing, and punishment. His work "Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment" is divided into four volumes. Edited by Bailey with separate extensive explanatory notes, and published by Routledge in 2021, the four volumes are more than 1500 pages long in which Bailey covers almost everything about crime and punishment from 1776 to 1914. In his review of the four volumes, Simon Devereaux described Bailey as "a scholar who, with Martin Wiener, stands preeminent amongst historians of crime, society, and punishment in modern England." Bailey was awarded the Walter D. Love Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies (1998), the W. T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Marquis Who's Who's Lifetime Achievement Award.
