Currie, Elliott

University of California, Irvine

United States

Professor of Criminology, Law and Society

Elliott Currie is Professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He has also taught in the Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Board of Studies in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Professor Currie is the author of many works on crime, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse and social policy, including Confronting Crime (1985), Dope and Trouble: Portraits of Delinquent Youth (1991), Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future (1993), and Crime and Punishment in America (1998), which was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. He is a coauthor of Whitewashing Race: the Myth of a Colorblind America (2003), a finalist for the C. Wright Mills award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2004 and winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change. His book The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence, a study of troubled middle-class youth in America, appeared in 2005. His newest book, The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective, was published by Prentice-Hall in 2008.

He has been a consultant to many organizations concerned with crime prevention, social policy, and the enhancement of juvenile and criminal justice, both in the United States and overseas, including the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, the California Governor's Task Force on Civil Rights, and the Home Office of Great Britain.

Until 2009, Professor Currie was vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a nonprofit organization that develops, evaluates, and supports innovative strategies to combat inner-city crime, drug abuse, and poverty. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the August Vollmer Award from the American Society of Criminology and both the Donald Cressey Award and the Prevention for a Safer Society (PASS) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.