Dr. Leonidas Cheliotis, Associate Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Policy, has won the prestigious Gerhard O.W. Mueller Award for 2020.
The award is conferred annually by the International Section of the American Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences for 'outstanding contributions to the field of comparative/international criminal justice', and has previously been won by such scholars as Gary LaFree, Bill Pridemore, Margaret Shaw, Louise Shelley, Finn-Aage Esbensen, Jay Albanese, Ron Huff, James Finckenauer, Martin Killias and Jeremy Travis.
Dr. Cheliotis won the award for his widely published work on the political and economic underpinnings of crime and penal and cognate policies in Greece, the UK and the US from both national and international comparative perspectives. His work brings together theoretical concepts and empirical insights from a variety of disciplinary fields –especially from sociology, political science, psychology and history–, and has so far addressed such themes as the politics of imprisonment and immigration detention under varying economic conditions; the reality and politics of common crime, corruption and political violence in the context of economic downturn; the links between processes of democratisation and different forms of state punitiveness; the forms and effectiveness of prison reform interventions by national and international inspectorate and judicial bodies; and the role of public opinion in criminal justice policy-making. At present, Dr. Cheliotis is working on a book project focusing on the relationship between presidential politics, public opinion and criminal justice policy in the US from the mid-1960s onwards.
Dr. Cheliotis is currently Book Review Editor of the British Journal of Criminology, and serves on the editorial boards of several other internationally leading journals in the field of criminology, such as Punishment & Society and the European Journal of Criminology. At LSE, he is director of the MSc Criminal Justice Policy, and teaches on an array of courses in Criminology and Social Policy, including Punishment & Penal Policy. He also currently directs LSE’s Mannheim Centre for Criminology.
He will be presented with the award on 26 March 2020 in San Antonio, Texas, at a ceremony during the 57th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.