Congratulations to two friends who won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology

There is no Nobel Prize in criminology, so two years ago criminologists decided to do the next best thing — create a Stockholm Prize in Criminology.

I was delighted to see that two friends have won this year’s award: Alfred Blumstein and Terrie Moffitt. Al Blumstein has done pathbreaking work for decades, including a lot of work on the link between guns, drugs, and youth homicide. He also runs NCOVR, which has been at the cutting edge of making crime data more easily available to researchers. Terrie Moffitt has undertaken long-term studies of large cohorts over decades in order to isolate predictors of eventual criminal involvment. She was on a National Research Council panel with me evaluating gun research. (The report of that panel, by the way, notes in numerous places that even using data provided by John Lott, we were unable to replicate — even in the narrowest academic sense of the word — many of Lott’s published results. Which makes you wonder about the lawsuit he filed against me.)