MORRIS, Norval 1923-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born October 1, 1923, in Aukland, New Zealand; died of heart failure, February 21, 2004, in Chicago, IL. Criminologist, educator, and author. Morris, a professor at the University of Chicago, was a leading criminologist and advocate of criminal-justice reform. After serving in the Australian Army during World War II, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in law from the University of Melbourne in 1946 and 1947, followed by a doctorate from the London School of Economics in 1949, where he then taught law for a year before joining the University of Melbourne faculty. He left Melbourne in 1958 for the University of Adelaide, where he served as dean of the law faculty and Boynthon professor. In the early 1960s, he directed the United Nations Institute for the Prevention of Crime, located in Japan, before being hired by the University of Chicago as Julius Kreeger professor of law. Morris was also dean of the Law School there from 1975 to 1979 and directed the university's Center for Studies in Criminal Justice from 1965 to 1975. Admired for his humanitarian approach to the problem of crime, Morris was one of the first scholars of criminal justice to recognize that punitive solutions alone could not help solve the crime problem, and he advocated reforms that were aimed at finding and reducing root causes; a classic work that addresses his approach is The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control (1970), which he wrote with Gordon Hawkins. Other works by Morris include The Habitual Criminal (1951), The Future of Imprisonment (1974), Madness and the Criminal Law (1982), The Brothel Boy, and Other Parables of the Law (1992), and Maconochie's Gentlemen: The Story of Norfolk Island and the Roots of Modern Prison Reform (2001).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 25, 2004, section 3, p. 11. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2004, p. B12. New York Times, March 7, 2004, p. A20. Washington Post, February 26, 2004, p. B6.