Steven Lab elected to lead national criminal justice academy

Steven Lab, chair of the Department of Human Services and director of the Criminal Justice Program, was named president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) earlier this month at the academy’s annual meeting in Boston. He will hold the position until March 2004.

Lab has previously served as first and second vice president of the organization and from 1995-98 as a trustee-at-large on the ACJS Executive Board.

The ACJS is an international organization established in 1963 to foster professional and scholarly activities in the field of criminal justice. Its members work to meet the organization's objectives of advancing the knowledge base in the fields of criminal justice education, research and policy analysis.

The organization sponsors an annual meeting every March featuring more than 250 panels devoted to a wide range of criminal justice topics. The meeting typically attracts 1,800-2,000 members.

The ACJS membership is made up primarily of academics, although there are also a large number of practitioners in the organization. The nearly 3,000 members are mostly from North America, but others come from around the world, including Europe, Asia and Australia.

Of his presidency, Lab says, “One major goal is to attract a wider audience of academics and practitioners to our meeting. The other major goal is to develop vehicles by which we can inform policy makers in Washington (and elsewhere) about what we are learning about crime and the criminal justice system. We cannot lobby, given our not-for-profit status, but we can provide input and offer advice.”

The ACJS publishes two academic journals, Justice Quarterly, described by Lab as “perhaps the leading journal in the field of criminal justice,” and the Journal of Criminal Justice Education, devoted to the pedagogy of criminal justice. In addition, ACJS publishes a guide to graduate programs in criminal justice.

Lab, a recognized expert in the area of crime prevention, has been on the BGSU faculty since 1987. A past editor of the Journal of Crime and Justice, he is the author or co-author of four books and more than three dozen articles and book chapters, and the editor of two more books. He consults with the National Institute of Justice (of the U.S . Department of Justice) on crime prevention, victimology and juvenile justice issues, and with the Ohio Attorney General's Ohio Against Gangs project.