Lonnie Athens

Lonnie H. Athens is an American criminologist, born in Richmond, Virginia, who studied at Virginia Polytechnic Institute before turning from political science to sociology and criminology, then continued his training at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley. He later served as senior research criminologist at Georgetown University Law Center and has taught in the criminology department at Seton Hall University. Athens developed the theory of violentization, presented fully in his 1992 book The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals, which describes how individuals become violent actors through four progressive stages: brutalization, belligerency, violent performances and virulency, a framework built on interviews with incarcerated offenders in Iowa and California and drawing on the symbolic interactionist tradition of sociologist George Herbert Mead. His research on the making of violent criminals was the basis for the 2017 documentary Why They Kill, directed by Giuseppe M. Fazari.