Since our blog is dedicated to public criminology, I thought it appropriate to call attention to the passing of Lloyd Ohlin. Dr. Ohlin died on December 6th at the age of 90. Dr. Ohlin is known for his work on juvenile delinquency, rehabilitation, and anti-poverty crime prevention. His classic work, with Richard Cloward, Delinquency and Opportunity is one of my favorites and argues, simply and elegantly, that crime results from differentially-distributed opportunity structures. Put simply, some of us can commit embezzlement because we work in a bank and others become drug dealers because we live in neighborhoods with large amounts of drugs and a high poverty rate. Ohlin noted that “[T]he boy who joins a gang isn’t in a rut. He has aspirations, but no place to go with them.”
In reading his obituary, it is clear that Ohlin operated as a public criminologist long before anyone would have called him that. For example, Delinquency and Opportunity was not mere academic theory. It was the basis and result of a number of anti-poverty and crime programs implemented in the 1960s, most notably the Mobilization for Youth program that offered legal services, psychological counseling, substance abuse programs, and other programs to at-risk populations. He also served in the Army during WWII and the Korean War, spending some time investigating conditions in Korean prisoner-of-war camps. He worked for the Illinois Department of Corrections interviewing parolees and consulted in a variety of positions under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. He was the second non-lawyer appointed in the Harvard Law School. Very few criminologists can boast this sort of variation (and success) in their careers or this level of commitment and involvement in the public and political sphere.
Dr. Ohlin was concerned about prison over-crowding and the potential for harm for juveniles being shuttled through the system, noting that this was likely to encourage further criminal involvement. Whether or not you subscribe to theories of crime like Cloward and Ohlin’s, many of the cautionary tales in Ohlin’s work in the 1960s have been borne today, especially in the areas of mass incarceration or the influence of neighborhood characteristics on crime.