Elliott P. Currie

Elliott Currie is Professor in the department 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 most recent book is The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence (2005), a study of troubled middle-class youth in America.

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.

Professor Currie is vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, a nonprofit organization that develops and supports innovative strategies to combat inner-city crime, drug abuse, and poverty. He serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Theoretical Criminology, Western Criminology Review, and the British Journal of Criminology. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including both the Donald Cressey Award and the Prevention for a Safer Society (PASS) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and a Fellow award from the Western Society of Criminology.

Dr. Currie is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago, and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.