Professor of Criminology, Law and Society
Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley
(949) 824-1387
ecurrie@uci.edu
2385 Social Ecology II
Department:
Criminology, Law and Society
Specializations:
Criminal justice policy in the U.S. and other countries; patterns and causes of violent crime; race, violence, and justice; social context of delinquency and youth violence; roots of drug abuse and the assessment of drug policy.
Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
His work focuses on the social and economic roots of American violence and the problems of the criminal punishment system in the United States. His most recent book, A Peculiar Indifference: the Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, explores the sources of enduring racial disparities in violent death and injury in America, and outlines strategies to reduce them. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020.
He is the author of many works on crime, delinquency, drug abuse, and social policy, including Confronting Crime: an American Challenge, Dope and Trouble: Portraits of Delinquent Youth, Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future, The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence, and The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective. His book Crime and Punishment in America, revised and expanded in 2013, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 1999.
He is a co-author of Whitewashing Race: the Myth of a Colorblind Society, winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change and a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, which was newly revised and updated in 2022. He is the co-editor, with Walter S. DeKeseredy, of Progressive Justice in an Age of Repression.
Currie is the recipient of both the August Vollmer Award and the Mentor Award from the American Society of Criminology. He is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago, and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.