If you know WBEB-FM Philadelphia owner Jerry Lee very well, you know that his interests extend far beyond radio. He was in Cambridge, England yesterday for the dedication of the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology. The opening is the latest philanthropic endeavor for the pioneering broadcaster, who has also been promoting pioneering efforts to fight crime. He also established the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.
The Cambridge Centre, located at the world’s oldest Institute of Criminology in the University that has won more Nobel Prizes than any other worldwide, will be home to the most extensive and experienced team of experimental criminologists in the world. Lawrence Sherman, the University’s new Wolfson Professor of Criminology, will lead the Centre at Cambridge. The founding president of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, Sherman is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities on evidence-based crime prevention.
In a decade-long partnership with Jerry Lee, Sherman was also the founding director of the Lee Center of Criminology and the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, to which the new Lee Centre at Cambridge will be closely linked. This is the latest step in the development of their mutual vision through conversations, projects, and fundraising from the US Congress, the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Philadelphia City Council, and other private foundations.
“The Cambridge Centre is the first academic program dedicated entirely to the discipline of experimental criminology, and marks an ongoing shift in the broader field of criminology,” said Lee, who was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology five years ago. “As the new Journal of Experimental Criminology has demonstrated since 2005, experimental evidence is quickly becoming the standard for determining what works and what doesn’t in the fight against crime. The fact that this centre is launched at the world’s oldest criminology institute is testament to that shift and the brain trust gathered here makes it even more impressive. I am honored to work with such an amazing collection of professionals and I’m excited about the advancements that will take place here.”
Lee also noted that since 2001, the Centre’s staff has already directed $10 million in research for the British government through the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerry Lee Center of Criminology.
More than half of the academic staff members at Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology are elected Fellows of the Academy of Experimental Criminology. These include Professor David Farrington, a former President of the Academy of Experimental Criminology; Professor Friedrich Losel, the sixth Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and a winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology; Dr. Manuel Eisner, the Institute’s Deputy Director, and Dr. Heather Strang who has managed the daily operations of more randomized field experiments with more cases than anyone else in the history of criminology.
While Lee is more widely recognized as a broadcaster, he has established himself as an expert in the field of criminology as well. He is the only non-criminologist who is a voting member of the Campbell Crime and Justice Group, an organization made up of the top 14 criminologists in the world and Lee. He was also instrumental in setting up the Crime Justice Journalist group at The Jerry Lee Center at the University of Pennsylvania, whose mission it is to inform crime reporters of which prevention programs work and which don’t.
The Cambridge Centre will recruit world-wide for a group of Jerry Lee Scholars to be trained as the leading experimental criminologists of tomorrow. The Jerry Lee Foundation’s gift will support their pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training, including supervised “apprenticeships” in design and leadership of field experiments in criminal justice. These experiments have included tests of the possible crime effects of early release of prison inmates to control prison populations, tests of intensive programs for high-risk violent probationers, and tests of strategies to prevent homicide in Philadelphia.
“The sky is the limit as to what the students and faculty of the Cambridge Jerry Lee Centre can discover,” Sherman said. “The magnificent support Jerry Lee has provided makes this a banner day for Experimental Criminology.”
Sherman said he expects there to be a significant collaboration between the Jerry Lee Center in Philadelphia and the newly created Jerry Lee Centre at Cambridge, resulting in the world’s first ongoing intercontinental academic criminology partnership. Jerry Lee is truly broadcasting a message of crime fighting innovation around the world.
