The emergence of criminology in the United States as an organized academic discipline unfolded across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through contests over jurisdiction, method, and theoretical priority among sociology, law, medicine, and social work—each claiming the authority to explain and address crime on the basis of distinctive professional expertise.
This article examines the European roots of American criminological thought, the role of the University of Chicago and the discipline of sociology in giving criminology its institutional home, the boundary contests among competing professional jurisdictions that shaped what academic criminology would and would not study, the role of federal investment in expanding the research enterprise, and the discipline’s consolidation through professional organization and textbook production within the broader History of Criminology. The argument advanced here is that American criminology’s distinctive character—its sociological orientation, its ambivalent relationship to biological and psychological approaches, its combination of scientific ambition with policy relevance—was not inevitable but was produced by specific institutional contests and disciplinary alliances that might have gone differently and whose consequences remain visible in the discipline’s contemporary organization.
Introduction
When the term “criminology” first circulated in American academic circles in the late nineteenth century, it described a loose assemblage of ideas and practices imported from European positivism and adapted to American reform concerns with little institutional coherence. The discipline that would eventually carry that name—a recognizable academic field with university departments, professional associations, textbooks, peer-reviewed journals, and training programs for criminal justice practitioners—did not emerge fully until the mid-twentieth century, and its emergence was contested at every stage by competing claims about who was qualified to study crime and what methods, theories, and practical applications the study of crime should produce.
The historical trajectory of American criminology’s institutionalization reveals several distinctive features that distinguish it from its European counterparts. American criminology developed primarily within sociology departments rather than within law faculties or medical schools, giving it a distinctively sociological theoretical orientation that emphasized structural and environmental causes of crime over biological and psychological ones. It developed in close proximity to the progressive reform movement’s concern with poverty, immigration, and urban conditions, giving it a practical orientation toward policy and prevention that pure scientific disciplines did not share. And it developed during a period of rapid university expansion and federal investment in social science research, giving it access to resources and legitimacy that earlier reform-oriented social science had lacked.
These distinctive features of American criminology’s institutional development—its sociological home, its reform orientation, its federal funding—shaped both what questions the discipline would address and how it would address them, with consequences that persist in the contemporary discipline’s theoretical frameworks, methodological preferences, and relationships to criminal justice practice.
American criminology’s development also reflected the specific racial politics of the United States in ways that shaped both what the discipline studied and what it could say publicly about what it found. The discipline that took shape in the early twentieth century was overwhelmingly white in its scholarly membership and was embedded in universities and reform institutions that operated under racial segregation throughout much of the country. The specific questions that white criminologists asked about race and crime, and the specific ways they answered those questions, were shaped by the racial ideologies of their time and the institutional constraints within which they worked—producing a body of research that, whatever its specific findings, operated within parameters defined by racial hierarchies that it rarely examined as objects of inquiry in their own right.
European Roots and American Adaptations
The Reception of European Positivism
American criminology drew its initial theoretical resources from the positivist criminology developed in Europe—particularly the Italian School associated with Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Raffaele Garofalo, and the statistical tradition associated with Adolphe Quetelet, André-Michel Guerry, and Gabriel Tarde. The Italian positivists had established the scientific study of the criminal as a distinct enterprise, arguing that crime was the product of biological abnormalities that distinguished criminals from law-abiding citizens and that required scientific identification, classification, and treatment. The French statistical tradition had established the analysis of crime rates as a social phenomenon subject to regular patterns that social conditions could explain and social policy could influence.
American social scientists received these European traditions selectively and adaptively rather than wholesale. The biological determinism of Lombrosian positivism found a receptive audience among American eugenicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—particularly in the work of sociologist Cesare Lombroso’s American admirers, who conducted craniometric and anthropometric studies of prison populations and argued that criminal physiology could be identified through systematic measurement. But the Lombrosian tradition also attracted powerful critics who challenged both its empirical methods and its theoretical assumptions, most notably Charles Goring, whose The English Convict (1913) demonstrated through rigorous statistical analysis that the physical characteristics Lombroso claimed distinguished criminals from law-abiding citizens were not reliably present in prison populations, effectively discrediting the atavism theory in Anglo-American scientific circles.
The contested reception of European positivism in American intellectual life produced a characteristic pragmatic compromise: American criminologists drew on positivist social science’s insistence that crime must be studied empirically rather than merely philosophized about, and on its expectation that scientific understanding of crime would yield practical tools for prediction and prevention, while largely rejecting the specific biological determinism of the Lombrosian tradition in favor of sociological and environmental explanations. This selective appropriation reflected both the genuine scientific weaknesses of biological criminology and the political context of American progressivism, which was simultaneously committed to scientific expertise and to the reform of social conditions—a combination that pushed criminological theory toward structural explanations that justified environmental intervention rather than toward biological explanations that implied the futility of social reform.
The statistical tradition proved more durable and more influential in shaping American criminology’s empirical orientation. Quetelet’s demonstration that crime rates were stable social facts that varied systematically with social conditions provided the empirical foundation for the sociological approach to crime that American academics would develop. The recognition that crime was not simply the sum of individual pathologies but a social phenomenon with regular patterns that aggregate data could reveal justified the sociological approach to crime research and established the statistical analysis of official crime data as a legitimate scientific practice, even as criminologists increasingly recognized the limitations of those data as measures of actual criminal behavior.
The Role of Social Reform and the Progressive Movement
The progressive reform movement of the 1890s through the 1920s shaped American criminology’s practical orientation by establishing a close relationship between social science research and policy reform that distinguished American criminology from its European counterparts. Progressive reformers—settlement house workers, muckraking journalists, social gospel ministers, and university-based social scientists—shared a belief that the social problems of industrial capitalism, including crime, poverty, child labor, and workplace exploitation, were caused by remediable social conditions and could be addressed through a combination of social scientific understanding and political will.
This reform orientation gave American criminology a dual character that has been both its greatest strength and its most persistent tension: it aspired to be both a rigorous science and a policy-relevant practical enterprise, seeking to understand crime with the methods of social science while simultaneously providing guidance to legislators, courts, and practitioners who needed to respond to crime. The tension between these aspirations—between the values of scientific objectivity and the demands of practical relevance—ran through the discipline’s development and shaped its characteristic methodological compromises and theoretical eclecticisms.
The progressive movement’s specific institutional achievements in criminal justice also shaped the research agenda that American criminology would address. The establishment of the juvenile court in Cook County in 1899—soon replicated across the United States—created a new institution whose treatment philosophy of individualized rehabilitation required social scientific understanding of juvenile delinquents’ backgrounds, circumstances, and needs. The proliferation of probation, parole, and indeterminate sentencing created practitioners who needed the ability to predict recidivism and assess rehabilitation, generating demand for the risk prediction and assessment tools that criminological research would subsequently develop. These institutional demands from criminal justice practice were not merely external pressures on academic criminology but productive forces that shaped the questions the discipline addressed.
The relationship between criminological research and progressive reform institutions was bidirectional in important ways. Academic criminologists sat on commissions, advised reformers, and provided expertise that shaped the design of juvenile courts, probation systems, and reformatory institutions. William Healy’s work at the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago, which he founded in 1909 in direct relationship with the juvenile court, exemplified this pattern: his case study approach to understanding individual delinquents combined clinical psychology with social investigation in ways that provided practical guidance to court practitioners while also establishing a methodology for criminological research that influenced the discipline for decades. His 1915 treatise The Individual Delinquent ran to nearly 900 pages and became the authoritative text on the clinical study of delinquency, demonstrating that rigorous case-by-case scientific analysis could yield insights about the causes of juvenile offending that aggregate statistical approaches alone could not generate. In return, these institutions provided access to populations and data—court records, case files, institutional histories—that were essential to the empirical research programs that criminologists were developing. This symbiosis between academic criminology and reform institutions created both opportunities and constraints: it provided research resources and policy relevance that purely academic research would have lacked, while also creating pressures to produce findings that supported reformers’ prior commitments and avoided findings that would undermine them.
Table 1. Institutional Milestones in the Development of American Criminology
| Year | Event | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 1899 | Establishment of first juvenile court (Cook County) | Created demand for criminological expertise in individual case assessment |
| 1909 | Publication of Healy’s The Individual Delinquent | Established psychological case study method in American criminology |
| 1919 | University of Chicago sociology establishes graduate criminology program | Consolidated sociological dominance in American criminological training |
| 1929 | FBI establishes Uniform Crime Reports | Created national crime statistics infrastructure for criminological research |
| 1941 | Sutherland’s Principles of Criminology (3rd ed.) | Established sociological definition of criminology in dominant textbook |
| 1951 | American Society of Criminology founded | Professionalized criminological identity distinct from sociology and law |
| 1967 | President’s Crime Commission report | Federal investment in criminological research and criminal justice reform |
| 1968 | Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act; LEAA established | Largest federal investment in criminological research infrastructure |
The University of Chicago and Disciplinary Formation
Sociology as the Institutional Home
The decision to locate criminology primarily within academic sociology departments rather than within law schools, medical schools, or freestanding criminology programs was not predetermined but reflected the specific intellectual and institutional circumstances of early twentieth-century American universities. Sociology, newly established as an academic discipline in American universities, was actively seeking empirical research programs that would demonstrate its scientific value and distinguish it from the social philosophy and reform advocacy from which it was emerging. The study of crime, delinquency, and urban deviance provided exactly the kind of empirical research program that sociology needed: it addressed social problems of urgent public concern, it required systematic data collection and analysis that could demonstrate scientific rigor, and it connected academic knowledge to the reform institutions—courts, corrections, settlement houses—whose practitioners were potential consumers of sociological expertise.
The University of Chicago’s sociology department was the decisive institutional site for criminology’s disciplinary formation. Robert Park’s ecological framework, the delinquency research of Shaw and McKay, Thrasher’s gang study, and the department’s training of a generation of graduate students who would staff university sociology and criminology departments across the country all flowed from this single institutional location. The Chicago department’s prestige, its graduate program, and the intellectual influence of its faculty meant that the sociological approach to crime—emphasizing environmental and structural causes over biological and psychological ones—became the dominant paradigm of American academic criminology by the 1930s.
Edwin Sutherland’s Principles of Criminology, first published in 1924 and revised through multiple editions until 1955, institutionalized the sociological definition of criminology in the discipline’s dominant textbook. Sutherland’s explicit definition of criminology as the study of the making of laws, breaking of laws, and reactions to laws—and his insistence that differential association theory provided a sociological explanation of criminal behavior that was both more parsimonious and more general than biological or psychological alternatives—established the terms within which subsequent American criminological theorizing would proceed. By the time the American Society of Criminology was founded in 1951, the discipline had a clearly sociological identity that distinguished it from the medical model criminology of European traditions and from the legally oriented criminology of law school faculties.
Edwin Sutherland and the Consolidation of the Field
Edwin Sutherland (1883–1950) was arguably the most important figure in the consolidation of American criminology as a distinct academic discipline, contributing not only the theoretical framework of differential association but also the institutional vision and textbook infrastructure that gave the discipline its professional identity. His presidential address to the American Sociological Society in 1939, in which he introduced the concept of white-collar crime, was as much a disciplinary manifesto as a theoretical contribution: by insisting that criminology’s domain extended to the crimes of the powerful and the respectable as well as to street crime and juvenile delinquency, Sutherland challenged the implicit class bias of the criminological enterprise and expanded its theoretical ambitions beyond the narrow focus on lower-class deviance that the social disorganization tradition had encouraged.
Sutherland’s development of differential association theory as a distinctively sociological alternative to both biological determinism and psychological reductionism represented the discipline’s theoretical coming-of-age. By arguing that criminal behavior, like all behavior, was learned through interaction with others—that the criminal versus law-abiding character of behavior reflected the balance of definitions favorable and unfavorable to law violation in one’s social environment—Sutherland provided a theory that was simultaneously general (applicable to all crime types and all social groups), sociological (locating causes in social relationships rather than individual traits), and empirically testable (predicting specific patterns in who would and would not engage in crime based on their social affiliations). The theory’s influence on subsequent research was enormous, motivating both direct empirical tests and theoretical extensions that produced the social learning theory framework that remains among criminology’s most productive paradigms.
Competing Jurisdictions and the Boundary Disputes
Law, Medicine, and Social Work
American criminology’s development as a sociological discipline was shaped not only by what sociology contributed to the study of crime but by what law, medicine, and social work did not provide. Law’s claim to jurisdiction over crime was based on its expertise in legal definitions, adversarial procedure, and the rights of accused persons—expertise that was essential to criminal justice practice but that provided few tools for understanding why crime occurred, who committed it, or how it could be prevented. Medical and psychiatric claims to jurisdiction rested on the argument that crime was a symptom of individual pathology—mental illness, feeblemindedness, neurological abnormality—that required individual clinical treatment rather than sociological analysis or structural reform. Social work’s claim drew on its expertise in individual case assessment and the provision of services to disadvantaged families, positioning it as the practical implementation arm of social scientific understanding.
Each of these competing jurisdictions had genuine strengths that sociology lacked: law’s commitment to procedural fairness and individual rights; medicine’s diagnostic precision and treatment knowledge; social work’s practical skills in client assessment and service provision. But each also had limitations that the sociological approach addressed: law’s focus on individual cases rather than social patterns; medicine’s tendency to locate causation in individual biology rather than social structure; social work’s focus on individual family circumstances rather than neighborhood conditions and structural inequality. The discipline that emerged from these jurisdictional contests was more sociological than any of the alternatives, but it retained practical connections to legal, medical, and social work institutions that shaped both its research agenda and its graduate training programs.
The American Society of Criminology and Professional Identity
The founding of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in 1941—initially as the National Association of Sanitary and Sociological Sciences, reorganized and renamed in 1951—represented the consolidation of criminology as a profession distinct from its parent disciplines. The ASC brought together academics from sociology, psychology, law, and political science who shared an interest in crime and criminal justice, along with practitioners from police departments, courts, corrections agencies, and probation and parole offices. This combination of academic and practitioner membership reflected the discipline’s dual identity as both a scientific enterprise and a practical profession, creating ongoing tensions between basic and applied research orientations that have characterized the ASC throughout its history.
The professional organization of criminology through the ASC also created the institutional infrastructure—journals, conferences, textbooks, graduate programs, and certification standards—through which a disciplinary identity could be reproduced across generations of scholars. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Criminology, and Crime & Delinquency provided venues for the accumulation and evaluation of criminological knowledge that distinguished academic criminology from journalistic or reform-advocacy approaches to crime. The graduate programs that trained successive generations of criminologists in sociological theory and quantitative methods reproduced the discipline’s intellectual character and ensured that new generations of researchers would approach crime through the theoretical and methodological frameworks that the discipline had established.
The ASC’s ambivalent relationship to criminal justice practice—bringing together academic researchers and criminal justice practitioners within a single professional organization—also created ongoing tensions about the discipline’s appropriate relationship to the institutions it studied. Academic criminologists whose primary commitment was to scientific objectivity and theoretical development sometimes chafed at sharing a professional organization with practitioners whose primary commitments were to operational effectiveness and institutional legitimacy. Practitioners sometimes found academic criminological research insufficiently attentive to the operational realities and practical constraints within which they worked. Managing these tensions—between basic and applied research, between scientific independence and policy engagement, between academic and practitioner perspectives—has been a persistent organizational challenge that the ASC has addressed through varying strategies across its institutional history.
Federal Investment and the Research Enterprise
The President’s Commission and the LEAA
The transformation of American criminology from a relatively small academic specialty into a large research enterprise was accomplished primarily through federal investment in the 1960s and 1970s, catalyzed by the political crisis of rising crime rates and urban disorder during the Johnson administration. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, established in 1965 and reporting in 1967 with the landmark document The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, provided both a systematic diagnosis of American crime problems and a blueprint for research investment that would guide federal criminal justice policy for two decades.
The Commission’s report commissioned seventeen task force studies on specific aspects of crime and criminal justice, drawing on academic criminological expertise in ways that gave criminological research unprecedented visibility and influence in federal policymaking. The report’s recommendations for federal investment in criminal justice research and reform led directly to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and provided hundreds of millions of dollars annually for criminal justice improvement and research. The LEAA’s research funding arm, the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (subsequently renamed the National Institute of Justice), became the primary source of federal support for criminological research, funding studies of police effectiveness, correctional programs, crime prevention, and criminal justice system operations that transformed the scale and scope of the discipline’s empirical research enterprise.
The National Institute of Justice and Evidence-Based Practice
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), established within the Department of Justice in 1979 as a successor to the LEAA’s research arm, institutionalized the relationship between federal funding and criminological research that the LEAA had pioneered. NIJ’s grant programs supported research on virtually every aspect of crime and criminal justice—from basic theoretical research on the causes of criminal behavior to applied evaluation research on the effectiveness of specific programs and policies—creating a demand for criminological expertise that expanded graduate training programs, tenure-track faculty positions, and the infrastructure of criminological research institutions across the country.
The expansion of federal funding also profoundly shaped what kinds of research criminologists conducted and how they conducted it. The LEAA’s preference for applied research—studies of specific programs and policies rather than basic research on crime’s causes—biased the research enterprise toward evaluation research and away from theoretical development. The agency’s requirement that funded research address practical policy questions created incentives for criminologists to frame their work in terms of immediate policy relevance rather than long-term scientific understanding. And the agency’s bureaucratic organization—with different program offices responsible for police research, courts research, and corrections research—fragmented criminological research along the institutional lines of criminal justice administration rather than along the theoretical lines that would have been most productive for scientific understanding.
NIJ’s influence on criminological research extended beyond the specific studies it funded to the broader orientation it promoted toward evidence-based practice—the systematic use of rigorous scientific evidence to guide criminal justice policy and practice decisions. The agency’s publication of Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising in 1997, prepared by Lawrence Sherman and colleagues, exemplified this orientation: it applied a systematic methodology for evaluating the quality of evidence on crime prevention programs and provided practitioners and policymakers with a research-based guide to investment decisions. This evidence-based orientation, developed and promoted through NIJ’s funding and publications, has become the dominant framework within which American criminology conceptualizes its practical contribution to criminal justice improvement.
The Self-Report Revolution and Methodological Transformation
Challenging Official Statistics and Their Hidden Biases
The methodological foundations of American criminology were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the development of self-report surveys as an alternative to official statistics for measuring criminal behavior. The official statistics that earlier criminological research had relied upon—arrest records, court convictions, correctional admissions—were increasingly recognized as measuring not the distribution of criminal behavior in the population but the outcomes of a complex social process in which victim reporting decisions, police deployment patterns, prosecutorial discretion, and judicial decision-making all intervened between the original criminal act and the statistical record.
Austin Porterfield’s pioneering self-report research in the 1940s and Short and Nye’s development of the self-report survey methodology in the 1950s demonstrated that criminal behavior was far more widely distributed in the general population than official records suggested. Most importantly, the social class gradient in officially recorded crime—which showed dramatic overrepresentation of lower-class individuals in arrest and conviction statistics and which had provided the empirical foundation for strain theory’s emphasis on blocked opportunities as crime’s primary cause—largely disappeared when criminal behavior was measured through self-report rather than official records. This finding had major implications for criminological theory: it suggested that the class concentration of official crime reflected differential criminal justice processing rather than genuine behavioral differences, undermining the empirical foundation of theories that located crime’s causes specifically in lower-class structural disadvantage.
Methodological Pluralism and the Expansion of Measurement
The self-report revolution did not render official statistics obsolete but established the principle of methodological triangulation—using multiple measurement approaches and comparing their results to assess the biases of each—that has characterized sophisticated criminological research ever since. The subsequent development of victimization surveys through the National Crime Survey (later the National Crime Victimization Survey, NCVS) added a third major measurement approach that captured crimes not reported to police from the perspective of victims rather than offenders, providing yet another window onto the distribution of criminal behavior that official records could not provide.
The combination of official records, self-report surveys, and victimization surveys produced a richer and more reliable picture of crime’s distribution and trends than any single source could provide, while also revealing the distinctive biases and coverage limitations of each. Official records captured detection and processing rates as much as behavior; self-report surveys had difficulty measuring serious, infrequent offenses and excluded incarcerated and homeless populations; victimization surveys could not measure crimes without victims and were limited by recall biases. Understanding how these different measurement systems related to each other and to underlying criminal behavior became a significant methodological enterprise in its own right, producing a body of measurement research that has substantially improved criminology’s ability to draw valid inferences from imperfect data.
Conclusion
The emergence of criminology as an organized academic discipline in the United States was a contingent historical achievement produced by specific institutional contests, disciplinary alliances, and political investments that might have gone differently. The sociological orientation that came to dominate American criminology—its emphasis on structural and environmental causes of crime, its use of aggregate statistical analysis alongside ethnographic case study, its ambivalent relationship to biological and psychological approaches—reflected the specific circumstances of sociology’s establishment as a discipline and the Chicago School’s formative influence rather than any intrinsic property of crime as a subject of scientific inquiry.
The practical orientation that has characterized American criminology—its sustained attention to policy relevance, its engagement with criminal justice practitioners, its responsiveness to federal funding priorities—reflected the progressive reform movement’s shaping of the discipline’s early institutional identity and the federal investment of the 1960s and 1970s that expanded its research enterprise. These practical commitments have been both a source of the discipline’s social significance and a source of tensions with the scientific values of theoretical parsimony, methodological rigor, and freedom from policy pressures that academic disciplines also require.
Understanding criminology’s institutional history is not merely of historical interest but provides essential context for evaluating the discipline’s contemporary theoretical frameworks, methodological preferences, and relationships to criminal justice practice. The choices made in the discipline’s formative decades—to locate criminology in sociology departments, to emphasize structural over biological explanations, to maintain practical connections to criminal justice institutions—continue to shape what questions criminologists ask, what methods they employ, and what practical contributions they make to the social problems they study.
The discipline that emerged from these historical processes is intellectually hybrid in ways that both enrich and complicate its scientific ambitions. American criminology incorporates sociological theory, psychological research, legal analysis, statistical methodology, and ethnographic fieldwork in ways that make it authentically interdisciplinary while also making its theoretical core less unified than purely disciplinary sciences. This intellectual heterogeneity reflects the complexity of crime as a social phenomenon—one that cannot be adequately understood from the perspective of any single discipline—and it has been a source of theoretical innovation as well as of occasional confusion about the discipline’s proper domain and methods.
The federal investment that transformed criminology into a large research enterprise from the 1960s onward also created institutional dependencies that have shaped the discipline’s research agenda in ways that are not always aligned with its scientific priorities. The responsiveness of criminological research to federal funding cycles, to the political priorities of successive administrations, and to the practical needs of criminal justice agencies has kept the discipline engaged with socially significant questions while also constraining its freedom to pursue fundamental scientific questions that may not have immediate policy applications. Navigating this tension between scientific independence and policy relevance remains one of the central challenges of American criminology as an institutional enterprise. The discipline’s history suggests that this tension is not resolvable but productive: the most significant advances in criminological understanding have typically come from scholars who maintained genuine scientific standards while remaining engaged with the social problems and institutional realities that make criminological knowledge practically important.
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