Roger Matthews

Roger Matthews (1948-2020) was a British criminologist who held professorships in criminology at London South Bank University, Middlesex University and, most recently, the University of Kent in Canterbury. Matthews was a founding figure of left realism in British criminology, a perspective developed in the 1980s that took the impact of crime on working-class and marginalized communities seriously as a real social problem, in contrast both to purely punitive right-wing criminology and to left-wing approaches that Matthews and his collaborators felt downplayed victims' concerns. In 1986 he co-edited the volume Confronting Crime with fellow left realist Jock Young, and he later revisited and updated the perspective in his 2014 book Realist Criminology, addressing criticisms the approach had drawn since its founding and reassessing its relevance to contemporary crime and criminal justice debates.