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Professor David Brotherton Honored with the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award by American Society of Criminology

October 24, 2011, New York, NY – The American Society of Criminology (ASC) has named Professor David Brotherton, Co-Chair of the Department of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as the Critical Criminologist of the Year. The award will be presented at the ASC Annual Conference, November 16-19, in Washington, DC.

"I am honored to receive this recognition from my esteemed colleagues in the field. I have worked long and hard to tell the stories of the least powerful members of society who have been caught in the webs of an increasingly inhumane and irrational criminal justice system. We always need to remember that where there is oppression and repression there will always be resistance of various forms," said Professor Brotherton.

The Critical Criminologist of the Year honors a person for distinguished accomplishments which have symbolized the spirit of the Division in some form of scholarship, teaching, and/or service in a recent year or years. Past winners include some of the U.S.'s leading criminologists who see crime as intrinsically connected to the unequal relations of power in society with criminal law largely operating in the interests of the powerful. Critical criminology is a very popular perspective in Europe, Latin America as well as the U.S. and came into existence during the radical turn in the social sciences in the 1960s when many academic disciplines were critiqued for their ideological adherence to the status quo.

In the fields of sociology and criminology Dr. Brotherton is primarily concerned with the dialectical relationship between social exclusion and resistance. The subjects of his collaborative ethnographic studies include high school drop-outs, street gangs, deportees and undocumented immigrants. Currently, Dr. Brotherton is particularly involved in the developing field of cultural criminology and its application to transnational populations.

Professor Brotherton joined the John Jay College faculty in 1994. He is a member of the Graduate Center Ph.D. programs in criminal justice, sociology and urban education and is John Jay's faculty representative at the European Common Sessions in Critical Criminology. In addition to CUNY, Dr. Brotherton is a research associate at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, Goldsmith's College (University of London), and London Metropolitan University. He has co-authored or co-edited seven books. His most recent book is Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile.

Professor Brotherton received his PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara.

The American Society of Criminology is an international organization whose members pursue scholarly, scientific, and professional knowledge concerning the measurement, etiology, consequences, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency. The Society's objectives are to encourage the exchange, in a multidisciplinary setting, of those engaged in research, teaching, and practice so as to foster criminological scholarship, and to serve as a forum for the dissemination of criminological knowledge. Its members include students, practitioners, and academicians from the many fields of criminal justice and criminology.

Established in 1964, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York is an international leader in educating for justice. It offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu.