A genuine fondness for mankind motivated Norval Morris throughout his life, said family, friends and his colleagues at the University of Chicago.
“My father was a classic humanitarian,” said his son Gareth. “He was devoted to working for the decent treatment of all people, particularly those in the criminal justice system, because he deeply believed that was a true measure of how civilized a society was.”
Dr. Morris, 80, a renowned criminologist, advocate for criminal-justice reform, and professor of law and criminology at University of Chicago, and former dean of its law school and founding director of its Center for Studies in Criminal Justice, died of heart failure Saturday, Feb. 21, in Mercy Hospital, Chicago.
“He is probably the world’s premier expert on prisons and correctional reform,” said Chip Coldren, president of the John Howard Association, a prison-reform group in Chicago. “He was essentially a scholar and a critic who understood how prisons around the world ran, the basic issues underlying the running of them and the philosophy and policies that should be driving them.”
As author, co-author or editor of 15 books and hundreds of articles, Dr. Morris wrote on criminal justice, corrections and punishment policies and the state of prisons throughout the world.
“The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control,” a book he co-authored, was provocative when published in the 1970s and remains required reading for students in crime and justice. Dr. Morris and co-author Gordon Hawkins argued that “when the criminal law invades the spheres of private morality and social welfare, it exceeds its proper limits at the cost of neglecting its primary tasks.”
Born in New Zealand, Dr. Morris served in the Australian army in World War II. He received a doctorate in law and criminology at the London School of Economics in 1949 and was appointed to its law faculty. From 1950 to 1958, he was on the faculty at University of Melbourne. The following four years, he was the dean of the faculty of law at University of Adelaide. In 1964, while he was in Japan as the founding director of the United Nations Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders, the University of Chicago invited him to join its staff.
Albert Alschuler, a university colleague, met Dr. Morris in 1967 when Alschuler became a fellow of the university’s Center for Studies for Criminal Justice and participated in a study of the nation’s criminal justice system led by Dr. Morris.
“He was already as pre-eminent a criminal justice scholar as there was in the world, an awesome scholar who was totally committed to not just theorizing, but getting down on the ground and seeing how the prisons worked and how they could be fixed,” Alschuler said. “He was among the first to recognize that we weren’t going to solve crime problems by just getting more punitive, that we had to deal with the things about the crime . . . that made them attractive to people.”
Other survivors include Dr. Morris’ wife, Elaine; two other sons, Malcolm and Christopher; and three grandchildren.
A memorial service is planned for March.
