Robert D. Crutchfield is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Washington, where he served as chair for eight years. His research focus is on social inequality as a cause of crime, neighborhoods and crime, and racial inequality in the criminal justice system. He has written extensively on labor markets and crime, and on racial and ethnic disparities in prosecution, sentencing, and imprisonment.
Dr. Crutchfield is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, a past vice-president of that organization, and he was elected to serve on the Council of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and also to be Chair of ASA’s Crime, Law, and Deviance Section. From 2005 to 2011 he served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice. Crutchfield has been appointed to serve on several National Academy of Sciences panels, most recently on the panel studying the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. He has been on the Board of Directors of The Sentencing Project, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Office of Justice Program’s (National Institute of Justice) Science Advisory Board. Crutchfield is a winner of the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
Prior to his academic career, he was a juvenile probation officer and an adult parole officer in Pennsylvania. He also served on the Washington State Juvenile Sentencing Commission. Crutchfield holds a BA from Thiel College, Greenville Pennsylvania, and an MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.
