James F. Short, Jr.
James F. Short, Jr. served as the 75th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, entitled “The Social Fabric at Risk: Toward the Social Transformation of Risk Analysis,” was delivered at the Association’s 1984 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR December 1984, Vol 49 No 6, pp 711-725).
Obituary
Originally appeared in Footnotes, September/October 2018
Written by Lorine Hughes, University of Colorado-Denver, and Andrew Papachristos, Northwestern University
James Franklin Short, Jr. (Jim), Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University (WSU), died peacefully at his home in Pullman, WA, on May 13, 2018. He was 93 years old.
Jim was a pioneer in the study of crime, law, and deviance whose contributions to sociology are outdone only by his generous nature and love for his friends and family.
Jim’s name adorns a host of impressive things, including a statistical index used in criminology, a “best paper” award for from the ASA Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance, and an entire building on the campus of Washington State University. Jim served as the Director of Research on President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, a member of the Chicago Planning Commission, and President of both the American Sociological Association and the American Society of Criminology (the only person to have been elected to both positions).
A native of rural Illinois, Jim was the eldest of three sons and graduated from the same high school at which his father was Principal. He spent one year at Shurtleff College in Alton, IL, before becoming a Marine in the Navy V-12 unit at Denison University in Ohio. After five quarters at Denison and the end of WWII, 21-year-old Jim was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and joined a Marine unit in the occupation of Japan. Jim wrote openly about how his time in the military shaped his sociological imagination, not to mention afforded him the opportunity to pay for his education.
Following his return to the U.S., Jim graduated from Denison with a BA in Sociology (1946) and earned his MA (1949) and PhD (1951) in sociology at the University of Chicago. Jim’s time at the University of Chicago instilled in him a love for the city and fascination with the “Chicago School”—both of which lasted throughout his life. Influenced by faculty such as Everett Hughes, Samuel Kincheloe, Clifford Shaw, Louis Wirth, and, especially, William Ogburn, Jim became “hooked” on sociology during his second year of graduate school. His doctoral dissertation focused on the effects of business cycles on crime and, in combination with the research of close friend and fellow graduate student Andrew Henry, evolved into the groundbreaking book Suicide and Homicide: Some Economic, Sociological, and Psychological Aspects of Aggression (1954).
After earning his PhD, Jim accepted a position as Instructor of Sociology at WSU (known then as State College of Washington) in Pullman, WA, where he and his beloved wife Kelma would spend many happy years raising their two children, Susan and Michael, and building a large circle of friends. Within a year of arriving, Jim was appointed to a tenure-track assistant professor position and received a three-year faculty research fellowship to support his pursuit of a new line of inquiry that would change the face of the field and further define his criminological legacy. Building on Austin Porterfield’s (1946) findings showing little difference in the severity of offenses committed by college students and adjudicated delinquents, Jim and WSU colleague F. Ivan Nye published a series of articles challenging conventional wisdom about the distribution of criminal behaviors across social classes and demonstrating the feasibility of research on delinquent behaviors reported by institutionalized and non-institutionalized populations. This marks the beginning of formal efforts to standardize the use of self-reports in the study of crime and delinquency.
Jim’s interest in applying self-reports among delinquent populations led him back to Chicago in 1954, during which he discovered the social world of youth street gangs and began collaborating with gang theorist Albert Cohen. Jim eventually took a leave of absence from WSU to join the faculty of the University of Chicago as Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology and lead an ambitious three-year (1959-62) collaboration with Fred Strodtbeck. Known formally as the Youth Studies Project (YSP), their research collected a variety of sociological, psychometric, and observational data on more than 30 gangs and delinquent groups from roughly 25 Chicago communities in order to test propositions embedded in dominant macrolevel theoretical perspectives, particularly Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) highly influential Opportunity Theory. The resulting book, Group Process and Gang Delinquency (1965), advanced a group process perspective highlighting the causal significance of social interaction in delinquent and violent behaviors and showed that much of what previously had been interpreted as short-run hedonism could be better understood as the outcome of a rational balancing process in which the immediate rewards of status within the context of the gang are weighed against broader, more remote consequences. Gang scholars continue to analyze YSP data more than five decades later.
Returning to WSU, Jim promoted quickly to Professor and served as Dean of Graduate Studies (1964-68), Founding Director of WSU’s Social and Economic Sciences Research Center (1970-85), and President of the Pacific Sociological Association (1966-67), Sociological Research Association (1983), American Sociological Association (1984), and American Society of Criminology (1997). In addition, Jim served on numerous prestigious research commissions and councils, including President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1968-69), and was distinguished visiting professor/scholar at nine different American universities, the Rockefeller Center in Italy, and Kokugakuin University in Japan. Jim also served as Editor of the American Sociological Review (1972-74) and was a fellow of the American Society of Criminology (1984) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985).
Jim maintained a vibrant scholarly agenda throughout these engagements. He used his 1984 presidential address to the ASA to call for greater understanding of “how people in fact live with risks and how living with risks affects their perceptions and behavior.” The importance of group processes never left Jim’s mind and featured prominently in his studies of criminological topics ranging widely from white-collar crime to Poverty, Ethnicity, and Violence (1997). In a now-classic essay, Jim elaborated on his earlier work to identify “The Level of Explanation Problem in Criminology” (1985), noting that “complete explanation and understanding are impossible” without integrating macro, individual, and micro levels. More than a decade later, Jim returned to this topic for his 1997 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, urging criminologists to pay more attention to groups as units of analysis and to situational contexts and interaction processes contributing to violent and delinquent behaviors.
Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Jim authored 5 books, edited another 12, and published roughly 85 journal articles and more than 60 book chapters and encyclopedia entries. His pathbreaking contributions have been recognized with numerous accolades, including research awards from the Western Society of Criminology (1977) and Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (1987), as well as the Sutherland Award (1979), Wolfgang Award for Distinguished Achievement in Criminology (2000), and Herbert Bloch Award (2010) from the American Society of Criminology. In 1997, the James F. Short, Jr. Conference Room was established in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of St. Louis-Missouri; in 2002, the James F. Short, Jr. Article Award was inaugurated by the Crime, Law, and Deviance section of ASA; and, in 2009, the Sociology building at WSU was renamed Wilson-Short Hall. Jim also was honored by colleagues, friends, and students in a special session at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology in 2012 (quite fittingly held in Chicago).
Although Jim retired from WSU in 1997, he remained a dedicated Cougar and rarely missed a day at the office or his noon hour workout and conversations at the campus gym. He continued to mentor graduate students, exchange ideas and correspond with people throughout the country, and conduct research and write papers. His two most recent contributions, “Antifa, Gangs, and the Importance of Group Processes” and “Reflections on Disciplines and Fields, Problems, Policies, and Life,” appeared in print earlier this year.
Outside of his professional activities, Jim was a voracious reader who loved his family, the arts and culture, college and professional sports, gardening, Pullman and the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, and summers in the great outdoors of Priest Lake, ID. He is survived by brothers George and Ed, children Susan and Michael, son-in-law Steven, grandchildren Jay (wife Katie) and Annie, and great grandchildren Grace and James. He also leaves behind a legion of admirers whose lives he touched with his unparalleled intellect and gentlemanly charm. As one sociologist so eloquently put it, Jim’s was “the best soul in the business.”
