Saturday, October 18, 2008

Criminology In The Making (Part 2)

Has anyone read the book Criminology In The Making: An Oral History by John Laub? In this book, John presents his personal interviews with several pioneer criminologists including Edwin Lemert, Donald Cressey, Thorsten Sellin, Al Cohen, Lloyd Ohlin, and Daniel Glaser. I love this book. I think we need more students of the history of our discipline. So I often ask myself "what is my first book going to be once I'm finished this whole Ph.D. thing?". I have this idea of doing a follow-up to John's book which will include interviews with another generation of "giants" in criminology (a Criminology In The Making: Part II if you will). Particularly I'd love to do an extended interview with Al Blumstein and Travis Hirschi. John already did an interview with Travis Hirschi (who by the way was John's dissertation chair) in the introduction to the Craft of Criminology. NIJ also recently did an interview with Al Blumstein. But I'd like to explore these two in more detail and specifically get a perspective from each on looking back at the "great debate" in criminology. For those who don't know what the "great debate" is, Vold, Bernard, and Snipes coined this phrase in reference to a very heated debate in the mid to late 1980s between the Blumstein camp and the Hirschi camp on the nature of the all-too-familiar age-crime curve.

So who else would be good to interview for such a book? Oh, and don't anybody go stealing my book idea.

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