Top Results for Criminology

Robert J. Sampson is an American sociologist and criminologist known for studying neighborhoods, urban inequality, and crime. With colleagues, he developed the concept of collective efficacy, meaning residents' shared capacity to maintain social order through mutual trust and informal intervention....

John Braithwaite is an Australian criminologist whose book Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) introduced reintegrative shaming theory. He distinguishes stigmatizing shame, which excludes and labels offenders, from practices that condemn wrongdoing while restoring people to their communities. His...

Travis Hirschi was an American sociologist and criminologist associated with social control theories of crime. In Causes of Delinquency (1969), he argued that delinquency becomes more likely when attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief linking individuals to conventional society are weak. Wi...

David Garland is a British sociologist and scholar of law and criminology whose work examines punishment, social control, and the institutions governing crime. In Punishment and Modern Society, he analyzed penal practices through major traditions of social theory. His 2001 book The Culture of Contro...

Bruce Western is an Australian-born American sociologist whose research examines incarceration, poverty, labor markets, and racial inequality in the United States. In Punishment and Inequality in America, published in 2006, he documented how the expansion of imprisonment disproportionately affected...

David Matza was an American sociologist and criminologist associated with interpretive approaches to deviance and juvenile delinquency. With Gresham Sykes, he developed the concept of techniques of neutralization, describing justifications that allow offenders temporarily to set aside conventional m...

Robert Agnew is an American criminologist known for developing general strain theory, an expansion of earlier sociological accounts linking strain to crime. In a 1992 formulation, he argued that strain can arise not only from failure to achieve valued goals, but also from the loss of positive stimul...

Albert K. Cohen was an American sociologist and criminologist best known for Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, published in 1955. He argued that some working-class boys experience status frustration when judged by middle-class institutional standards and may form delinquent subcultures with...

Gresham M. Sykes was an American sociologist and criminologist known for research on prisons, punishment, and delinquency. The Society of Captives, published in 1958, analyzes the social order of a maximum-security prison and describes the deprivations experienced by incarcerated people as the "pain...

Richard A. Cloward was an American sociologist and social-work scholar associated with research on poverty, delinquency, and political organizing. With Lloyd E. Ohlin, he wrote Delinquency and Opportunity in 1960, developing an opportunity theory that linked forms of juvenile delinquency to unequal...

John Hagan is a Canadian sociologist and criminologist whose work examines crime, law, inequality, and political violence. He helped develop power-control theory, which links family power relations and gendered socialization to differences in adolescent delinquency. His later research has addressed...

Edward Alsworth Ross was an American sociologist associated with the formative period of sociology in the United States and with Progressive Era social thought. His book Social Control, published in 1901, examined the customs, beliefs, institutions, and pressures through which societies regulate ind...

Victor Rios is an American sociologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic work focuses on juvenile justice, policing, and the educational and social trajectories of marginalized youth of color. He is best known for his 2011 ethnographic book "Punished: Policin...

Lloyd Ohlin (1918–2008) was an American sociologist and criminologist who significantly influenced the study of juvenile delinquency and criminal justice. In collaboration with Richard Cloward, he co-authored "Delinquency and Opportunity" (1960), introducing differential opportunity theory, which po...