Jock Young

Jock Young (4 March 1942 – 16 November 2013) was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist. Biography Jock Young was educated at the London School of Economics. His PhD was an ethnography of drug use in Notting Hill, West London, out of which he developed the concept of moral panic. The research was published as The Drugtakers. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conferences and a group of critical criminologists in which milieu he wrote the groundbreaking, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance in 1973, with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton and The Manufacture of News (with Stan Cohen). He was Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Visiting Professor at the University of Kent, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Before moving to New York he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Middlesex where he was head of the Centre for Criminology. At Middlesex he devised the first postgraduate course in crime and deviancy in the UK. With his colleagues, most notably John Lea and Roger Matthews, he developed left realist criminology in a series of books including What Is to Be Done About Law and Order? (1984). He completed research on criminal victimisation, stop and search, and urban riots, and was a frequent contributor to media debates on crime and policing. He was lead investigator in the Gifford Inquiry of 1985 following the Broadwater Farm riot. The Centre for Criminology was particularly known for left realist criminology and its series of local crime victimisation surveys, for example, the Islington Crime Surveys which were conducted in 1986 and 1990. In 1998 he was awarded the Sellin-Glueck Award for Distinguished International Scholar by the American Society of Criminology followed in 2003 by the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Critical Criminology Division.