Lawrence W. Sherman
Encyclopedia
Lawrence W. Sherman is an academic criminologist. In 2006, he was elected Wolfson Professor of Criminology
Wolfson Professor of Criminology
The Wolfson Professor of Criminology is a senior professorship at the University of Cambridge. The position was established in 1960 by a benefaction by the Wolfson Foundation and is the first of its kind in Britain. The position's first holder was Sir Leon Radzinowicz. Recently, American...

 at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology
Cambridge Institute of Criminology
The Cambridge Institute of Criminology was founded in 1959, with the support of a benefaction from the Wolfson Foundation and the Howard League for Penal Reform. It is part of the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Law, but its multidisciplinary teaching and research staff are also recruited from...

 at Cambridge University, where he was appointed founding director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology in 2008. He is also Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice in College Park. Sherman’s primary research interests include crime prevention
Crime prevention
Crime prevention is the attempt to reduce victimization and to deter crime and criminals. It is applied specifically to efforts made by governments to reduce crime, enforce the law, and maintain criminal justice.-Studies:...

, evidence based policy, restorative justice
Restorative justice
Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of victims, offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender...

, police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...

 practices and experimental criminology.

Research

Sherman is a prolific writer and researcher who, by 2007, had published 9 books and over 100 book chapters and journal articles on a wide variety of topics. He is best known as an experimental criminologist. His use of randomized controlled experiment
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...

s to study deterrence
Deterrence (psychological)
Deterrence is a theory from behavioral psychology about preventing or controlling actions or behavior through fear of punishment or retribution...

 and crime prevention has led him to examine such wide-ranging issues as domestic violence
Domestic violence
Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence, and intimate partner violence , is broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an intimate relationship such as marriage, dating, family, or cohabitation...

, police crackdowns and saturation patrol, gun violence
Gun violence
Gun violence defined literally means the use of a firearm to threaten or inflict violence or harm. Gun violence may be broadly defined as a category of violence and crime committed with the use of a firearm; it may or may not include actions ruled as self-defense, actions for law enforcement, or...

 and [crime] , crack houses, and reintegrative shaming. He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world. Sherman’s research on domestic violence began in the 1980s with the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment
Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment
The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment was a study done in 1981-1982, led by Lawrence W. Sherman, to evaluate the effectiveness of various police responses to domestic violence calls in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The study was performed with cooperation from the Police Foundation and the...

. His early experimental research into the influence of arrest on recidivism in spouse abuse led to changes in police department policies and procedures nationwide, encouraged state legislatures to modify state statutes to allow for misdemeanor arrest, and eventually resulted in five federally-funded replications, one of which he conducted. In the late 1980s, Sherman’s experimental research into the effect of directed police patrol in high crime locations led to his development of the concept of “hot spots.” In the early 1990s, Sherman’s Kansas City Gun Experiment studied the effect of concentrated police patrol on gun crime and violence and that directed police patrol in gun crime “hot spots” led to an increase in seizures of illegally carried guns and a decrease in gun crimes.

Since 1995, Sherman has been co directing a program of prospective longitudinal experiments in restorative justice involving approximately 2,500 offenders and 2,000 crime victims. Recently, he has been working on the development of new tools for predicting murder among offenders on probation and parole in Philadelphia, as well as randomized trials of intensive services among highest risk offenders.

In addition to his experimental research, Sherman has published articles and book chapters on a wide variety of topics, including police corruption
Police corruption
Police corruption is a specific form of police misconduct designed to obtain financial benefits, other personal gain, or career advancement for a police officer or officers in exchange for not pursuing, or selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest....

, police education, police discretion
Discretion
Discretion is a noun in the English language with several meanings revolving around the judgment of the person exercising the characteristic.-Meanings:*"The Art of suiting action to particular circumstances"...

, police crackdowns, restorative justice, investigations, police use of force
Use of force
The term use of force describes a right of an individual or authority to settle conflicts or prevent certain actions by applying measures to either: a) dissuade another party from a particular course of action, or b) physically intervene to stop them...

, and fear reduction. In 1997, Sherman led a team of University of Maryland
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...

 criminologists in producing Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, a Congressionally mandated evaluation of over 500 state and local crime prevention programs.

His major discoveries can be summarized as follows:

• In 1980 he discovered that restricting police powers to shoot people was not followed by any increases in crime, or in violence against police officers; this evidence was later cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision to restrict police powers to kill across the US.

• In 1987 he discovered that over half of all reported crime and disorder occurred at just 3% of the property addresses in a major city, a finding that has since been consistently replicated in other cities. He showed that that exactly where and when crime will occur is far more predictable than anyone had previously thought, thus laying the theoretical and empirical basis for what is now called “hot spots policing,” now widely practiced from New York to Sydney.

• In 1995 he discovered that homicides, shootings and other gun crimes could be reduced by intensified but lawful use of police stop and search powers in hot spots of gun crime, a finding that has now been replicated in six out of six independent re-tests by other scholars. This research helped prompt a major change in police practice in the US that was followed by a substantial reduction in the US homicide rate.

• In 1992 he discovered that arrest has contradictory effects on different kinds of domestic violence offenders, causing less violence among employed men but doubling the frequency of violence among men without jobs. This finding has also been replicated by independent scientists, and is now the basis for some women’s advocates to recommend abandoning mandatory arrest policies for non-injurious domestic assault.

• In 1995, with his colleague David Weisburd, he demonstrated that doubling or tripling the frequency of police patrols in crime hot spots could reduce street crime by two-thirds. This discovery has been replicated by other scholars as well.

• In 2000, with his colleague Heather Strang (to whom he was married in 2010), he discovered that restorative justice conferences between violent offenders and their victims could reduce repeat offending by half.

• In 2006, with his colleagues Strang, Barnes and Woods, he showed that restorative justice also caused a 400% increase in criminal offending among Aboriginals, and that restorative justice must seen as a powerful and potentially dangerous intervention.

• In 2008, Sherman discovered with Strang that nine ten out of ten of the restorative justice experiments they designed with victims present substantially reduced the overall two-year frequency of repeat convictions or arrests, across a wide range of offence types, offenders, and points in the criminal justice system. This included seven that were independently assessed by Professor Joanna Shapland of Sheffield University.



Research on the prestige of scholars in criminology and criminal justice has listed Sherman as one of the most highly-cited scholars in the field.

Evidence-Based Policing

In a 1998 Police Foundation
Police Foundation
The Police Foundation, of Washington, DC, is a non-profit foundation dedicated to helping the police be more effective in doing their job. It was founded on July 22, 1970 by the Ford Foundation, and has continued to receive its primary support from that foundation, although it now has a large...

 lecture, Sherman sketched out the concept of “evidence-based policing,” modeled on the ideas of evidence-based medicine. His core idea was that police practice can be made far more effective if all of its complex but repeated elements were tested by repeated controlled field experiments. In February 2000, Sherman co-founded the Campbell collaboration's Crime and Justice Group, which has pursued the synthesis of research evidence on the effectiveness of policing and other crime prevention practices. Since then, the FBI Academy
FBI Academy
The FBI Academy, located in Quantico, Virginia, is the training site for new Special Agents of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was first opened for use in 1972 on 385 acres of woodland. It is a relatively small government academy, housing three dormitory buildings and...

 has offered a course on evidence-based policing, and it has become the subject of wide debate and commentary in police practice and research journals.

In 2008, Sherman made evidence-based policing (EBP) the core of the Police Executive Programme at Cambridge University, a part-time course of study for senior police leaders from around the world to earn a Diploma or Master’s in applied criminology. In that year, the National Policing Improvement Agency
National Policing Improvement Agency
The United Kingdom's National Policing Improvement Agency is a non-departmental public body established to support police by providing expertise in such areas as information technology, information sharing, and recruitment.-Background:...

 (NPIA) funded the first international conference on EBP, which was attended by police executives from Asia, Australia, Europe and the US.

Education

Sherman graduated magna cum laude from Denison University
Denison University
Denison University is private, coeducational, and residential college of liberal arts and sciences founded in 1831. It is located in Granville, Ohio, United States, approximately 30 miles east of Columbus, the state capital...

 in 1970, with a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 in political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

. He received an M.A.
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 in social science from the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in 1970 and earned a Diploma in Criminology from Cambridge University in 1973. In 1976, Sherman received his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

in sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

 from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

.

Academia

From 1999 to 2007, Sherman was Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, initially in the Department of Sociology. Under his leadership, Penn became the first Ivy League University to establish a Ph.D. in criminology as a separate field in 2000, and the first to establish a separate department of criminology in 2003, when Sherman was appointed the University’s first Professor of Criminology. He served as Chair of the University’s Department of Criminology from 2003 to 2007 and as the Director of the Fels Institute of Government from 1999 to 2005. He resigned from Penn in June of 2010.

Prior to his appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge, Sherman was a member of the faculty of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1982 to 1999, and returned there in 2010. He served as Maryland's Chair from 1995 to 1999. In 1998 he was named a Distinguished University Professor. In 1987, he was the Seth Boyden Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

’s Graduate School of Criminal Justice and from 1994 to 2005 he also served as Adjunct Professor of Law at the Australian National University
Australian National University
The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...

’s Research School of Social Science. From 1976 to 1980 he was on the faculty of the University at Albany’s School of Criminal Justice.

Sherman has also held a number of research posts, in addition to his academic duties. Currently, he is the co-director of the Justice Research Consortium in the United Kingdom, a position he has held since 2001. From 1995 to 2000, Sherman was the Scientific Director of RISE, a research institute sponsored by the Australian Federal Police
Australian Federal Police
The Australian Federal Police is the federal police agency of the Commonwealth of Australia. Although the AFP was created by the amalgamation in 1979 of three Commonwealth law enforcement agencies, it traces its history from Commonwealth law enforcement agencies dating back to the federation of...

. From 1985 to 1995 he served as president of the Crime Control Institute, and from 1979 to 1985 he was the Director of Research at the Washington-D.C.-based Police Foundation.

Awards and honors

Sherman has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards for his work in the field of criminology and criminal justice. In 1998 he became the Founding President of the Academy of Experimental Criminology and in 1999 was elected a fellow of the Academy. In 2006, the Academy presented him with the Joan McCord Award for Outstanding Contributions to Experimental Criminology.

In 1994, Sherman was elected a fellow of the American Society of Criminology
American Society of Criminology
The American Society of Criminology is an international organization whose members pursue scholarly, scientific and professional knowledge concerning the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency...

. In 1999, he received the Society’s Edwin Sutherland Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Criminology. In 2001 he was elected President of the Society. He served as President of the International Society for Criminology from 2000 to 2005 and President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science from 2001 to 2005; the AAPSS also elected him as a Fellow in 2008.

In 1994, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences presented Sherman with the Bruce Smith Sr. Award, in recognition of outstanding contributions to criminal justice as an academic or professional endeavor. Sherman received the Distinguished Scholarship Award in Crime, Law and Deviance from the American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...

in 1993, the Beccaria Medal in Gold from the Society of Criminology of German-speaking Nations in 2009, the Robert Boruch Award from the International Campbell Collaboration in 2010, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 2011.

Selected Writings

Lawrence Sherman and Heather Strang. 2007. Restorative Justice: The Evidence. London: Smith Institute, 95 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, David P. Farrington, Brandon Welsh and Doris MacKenzie, eds., Evidence-Based Crime Prevention. London: Routledge, 2002.

Lawrence W. Sherman, et al. 1997. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. Report to the U.S. Congress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, 655 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, Policing Domestic Violence: Experiments and Dilemmas. N.Y.: Free Press, 1992. (Winner of 1993-94 Distinguished Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association, Section on Crime, Law and Deviance).

Lawrence W. Sherman and Douglas A. Smith, "Crime, Punishment and Stake in Conformity: Legal and Informal Control of Domestic Violence." Am. Sociological Review, 57(5): 680-690 (1992).

Lawrence W. Sherman and Richard A. Berk, "The Specific Deterrent Effects of Arrest for Domestic Assault." Am. Sociological Review, 49(2): 261-272 (1984).

Lawrence W. Sherman, Patrick R. Gartin, and Michael E. Buerger, "Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of Place." Criminology 27: 27-55 (1989).

Lawrence W. Sherman, Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press (1978) 304 pp.

Lawrence W. Sherman, "Execution Without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution." Vanderbilt Law Review 33, 1:71-100 (1980). [Cited by U. S. Supreme Court in Tennessee v. Garner, 1985]

Lawrence W. Sherman, “Gun Carrying and Homicide Prevention” Journal of the American Medical Association 283: 1193-1195. March 1, 2000.
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