American Society of Criminology honors professor emeritus
Henry N. Pontell, UC Irvine professor emeritus of criminology, law and society, has been selected to receive the 2024 August Vollmer Award, one of the highest honors of the American Society of Criminology (ASC).
The award recognizes “an individual whose scholarship and professional activities have made outstanding contributions to justice and/or to the treatment or prevention of criminal or delinquent behavior.” It will be presented at the 2024 ASC Annual Meeting in November.
“I’m truly honored by this major recognition from ASC, and indebted to, and thank my incredible mentors, research collaborators, colleagues and students throughout the years who’ve made it possible,” Pontell says. “I share this with them all!”
The honor marks the fourth major award bestowed on Pontell in the last two years.
In 2023, he received a pair of awards from the American Society of Criminology Division of White-Collar & Corporate Crime:
- the 2023 Outstanding Book Award for Wayward Dragon: White-Collar and Corporate Crime in China (Springer), with Adam Ghazi-Tehrani; and
- the 2023 Outstanding Article Award for “In-Your-Face Watergate: Neutralizing Government Lawbreaking and the War Against White-Collar Crime” in Crime, Law and Social Change, with Robert Tillman and Adam Ghazi-Tehrani.
Pontell also won the 2023 Bruce Smith, Sr. Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Pontell's research and teaching interests include deviance and social control, white-collar and corporate crime, punishment and criminal justice system capacity issues, financial and health care fraud, identity theft, political corruption, comparative criminology and cybercrime. He has lectured at universities and government offices throughout the world, testified before the U.S. Senate on financial fraud, given invited presentations to the National Academies and the U.S. Department of Justice and worked with numerous organizations and law enforcement agencies including the FBI and U.S. Secret Service.
Pontell’s research on white-collar crime has been highlighted in the national and international media and he continues conducting domestic and comparative research on white-collar and corporate crime.
His publications include The International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (Springer), Social Deviance (McGraw Hill), Profit Without Honor: White-Collar Crime and the Looting of America (Pearson), Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis (University of California Press), A Capacity to Punish: The Ecology of Crime and Punishment (Indiana University Press), Contemporary Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honor of Gilbert Geis (Pearson), Looting America: Greed, Corruption, Villains and Victims (Prentice Hall), Prescription for Profit: How Doctors Defraud Medicaid (University of California Press), Financial Crime and Crises in the Era of False Profits (Oxford University Press) and Wayward Dragon: White-Collar and Corporate Crime in China (Springer). He also is editor of Keynotes in Criminology and Criminal Justice, an Oxford University Press book series, and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
When he worked at UCI, he served as chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society for seven years. He also served in other campus administrative positions, and he led the development of the No. 1-rated Master of Advanced Study in criminology, law and society, the first online degree program at the University of California.
Besides his emeritus status at UCI, Pontell is a distinguished professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.