UW Law Professor Emeritus Herman Goldstein has been awarded the 2018 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, as announced today.
This prize recognizes Prof. Goldstein as “the world’s most influential scholar on modern police strategy.”
Goldstein’s seminal 1977 book, “Policing a Free Society” and its 1990 follow-up, “Problem-Oriented Policing,” discussed police authority and discretion as well as conduct and corruption, and posited strategies for improving police function. His strategy of “problem-oriented policing” has been adopted in various forms by a large number of police agencies in the United States and internationally.
Goldstein based much of his early work on his own experiences in the mid-1950s and early 1960s with city management and policing– he spent two years as a researcher for the American Bar Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice, observing police operations in Wisconsin and Michigan, and then was executive assistant to O.W. Wilson, the “architect of the professional model of policing” and superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. After these experiences and subsequent writings, Goldstein received a Ford Foundation grant to continue his work within a law school setting, and he joined the Wisconsin law faculty in 1964.
See the law school’s official announcement here for additional information, as well as this recent oral history interview with Prof. Goldstein (hosted by the UW Law Library’s Digital Repository).
Congratulations, Prof. Goldstein!