Each semester, Dr. Shaun Gabbidon teaches a course on race and crime at Penn State Harrisburg, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice.
His objective: change perceptions.
“I ask who commits the most crime and inevitably they say Blacks commit the most crime,” he says. “Then I spend a whole semester getting them to understand the reality. We get into crack cocaine laws, powder cocaine laws, the prison industrial complex and everything from law creation to policing to what happens in court systems.”
Gabbidon, 42, is widely regarded as one of the nation’s top scholars on race and crime. In nearly 15 years in the academy, he has amassed a vast body of work on the subject. He is the author, co-author or editor of more than a dozen books and has written scores of articles for scholarly journals. He has received numerous honors. Last year, the Western Society of Criminology presented
Gabbidon with the 2009 W.E.B. DuBois Award for his “outstanding contribution to the field of racial and ethnic issues in criminology.”
“Shaun is one of a kind,” says Dr. Helen Taylor Greene, professor and chair of the Department of the Administration of Justice at Texas Southern University and one of Gabbidon’s mentors. “He is unequaled in the scholarship of race and crime. He is one of its leading lights and one of the leading scholars in race and crime. He is very committed to mentoring students and very committed to serving the professional associations. He is just the consummate scholar.”
Gabbidon’s scholarship in criminology focuses primarily on three areas: racial profiling of consumers, the social-historical perspective of race and crime and African-American criminological thought, a field in which he tries to introduce some of the great criminology scholars of color to the uninitiated. He is one of a few scholars who studies the issue of racial profiling in retail establishments. He recently served as a witness in a civil case against a retailer.
