Professor Lawrence W. Sherman is Director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology and Chair of the Cambridge Police Executive Programme at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. He is also a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. After coming to the Institute of Criminology as a graduate student in 1972, he earned his PhD from Yale University. Since then has been awarded honorary doctorates or medals from the University of Stockholm, Denison University, Yale University, University of Bialystok and George Mason University. He returned to Cambridge in 2007 as the Wolfson Professor of Criminology, and served as Director of the Institute from 2012 to 2017.
His research interests are in the fields of crime prevention, evidence-based policy, restorative justice, police practices and experimental criminology. He has conducted field experiments, for example, on finding more effective ways to reduce homicide, gun violence, domestic violence, robbery, burglary, and other crime problems, in collaboration with such agencies as the Metropolitan, Northumbria and Thames Valley Police, London’s Crown Courts, HM Prisons, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales, and the National Probation Service, as well as 30 US police agencies and the Australian Federal Police. Since 1995, he has been co-directing a program of prospective longitudinal experiments in restorative justice involving some 2500 offenders and 2000 crime victims. Since 2005, he has been developing new tools for predicting murder among offenders on probation and parole in Philadelphia, as well as randomized trials of intensive services among highest-risk offenders.
Professor Sherman has served as president of the American Society of Criminology, the International Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He has worked on several projects of the (US) National Academy of Sciences, and as a consultant to the FBI, the (UK) Home Office and Youth Justice Board, the Swedish Ministry of Justice, the (US) National Institute of Justice, the New York City Police Department, the National Police Agency of Japan, the Korean Institute of Criminology, the Justice Ministry of Lower Saxony, and many other agencies.
The author, co-author or editor of 9 books and over 100 book chapters and journal articles, Sherman has received the American Society of Criminology’s Edwin Sutherland Award, the Academy of Experimental Criminology’s Joan McCord Award, the American Sociological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Crime, Law and Deviance, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Bruce Smith Jr. Award, and the Campbell Collaboration’s Robert Boruch Award. The founding co-chair of the International Jury for the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, Sherman has also received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society for the Arts in London.
