Laubvia Katie Kaukinen: President Obama announced his intent to nominate the great life course criminologist John Laub to head the National Institute of Justice. I can’t imagine a better candidate for NIJ director.

John H. Laub – Director, National Institute of Justice, Department of Justice.
 
John Laub is the Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of Sociology at the University and a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. Dr. Laub was previously a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts from 1981 to 1998. He has served as the President and as a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, which awarded him the Edwin H. Sutherland Award. He was also named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland for the 2006-2007 academic year. Dr. Laub was the Editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology for five years and currently serves as an Associate Editor of Criminology. From 2002 to 2008, Dr. Laub was a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science. He has published two award winning books and many research articles in the areas of crime and the life course, juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice, criminal victimization, and the history of criminology. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in criminal justice from the State University of New York at Albany.