Elliott Currie

Elliott Currie is an American sociologist and professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, who earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Working within the left realist tradition, he argues that market societies that make private economic gain central to social life generate structural conditions, particularly in the labor market, that block people from stable employment and foster the individualism and inequality underlying high rates of violent crime, an argument he uses to help explain the United States' comparatively high levels of lethal violence. His book Crime and Punishment in America, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction, extended this analysis to broader crime policy debates.