100 Days of Achievement

The School of Criminal Justice celebrates recent good news.

ALBANY, N.Y. (November 17, 2015) — New hires, new initiatives and other recent successes of the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ) were celebrated on Nov. 4, a date designating the first 100 days of Dean William Alex Pridemore’s tenure.

The dean’s first announced priority is the hiring of outstanding new scholars, and a major initial victory was achieved with the hiring of David Hureau, who will join the faculty in fall 2016. Hureau, whose research interests include urban criminology, violence, gangs, and ethnographic methods, is now finishing his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University, where his advisor is noted sociologist Robert J. Sampson, a 1983 Ph.D. graduate of UAlbany.

Sharing the celebration of the first 100-day tenure of SCJ Dean William Alex Pridemore (center) are past deans Alan Lizotte (left) and Terence Thornberry.

The school will continue to grow by making further new hires soon, said Pridemore.

Two gifts of private philanthropy were also announced in the dean’s new ambitious fundraising campaign:

• An endowed fellowship created by a $125,000 gift from Bruce Davis, M.A. ’73, will provide graduate student stipends, giving SCJ a competitive edge in the recruitment of top students from across the country.
• A gift from Elizabeth Cass, PhD ’91, and Michael Lynch, PhD ’88, addresses another critical need through a $25,000 endowment to support graduate student travel, allowing doctoral students to showcase their research and gain valuable professional experience at academic conferences.

The event also noted that Pridemore has obtained funds to institute a Drive for Diversity. It includes dedicated support to hire a postdoctoral associate who researches topics related to diversity, crime, and justice; bolstering the recruitment of diverse graduate students; and securing the future of SCJ’s Justice & Multiculturalism Project, which explores issues at the intersection of diversity and social and criminal justice.

The dean detailed several successes this fall in expanding interdisciplinary collaboration:

• A memorandum of understanding with Albany Law School that will allow students to concurrently pursue their Master’s degree in Criminal Justice and their Juris Doctor degree.
• A joint hire with UAlbany’s School of Public Health.
• The cultivating of international associations through the attendance of a team of SCJ faculty this September at the European Society of Criminology conference in Porto, Portugal, and Pridemore’s Sept. 22 presentation at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice has been a leader in the discipline since its inception in 1968. Pridemore has challenged its faculty, students, and alumni to go beyond even that — to “set the standard” for the field of criminology and criminal justice.

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