Gordon Hawkins (1919–2004) / Norval Morris (1923–2004)
| Author | David Tait,Philip C. Stenning,Richard Harding |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.37.3.317 |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Obituaries |
317
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 37 NUMBER 3 2004 PP.317–322
OBITUARIES
Gordon Hawkins (1919–2004)
Gordon Hawkins, icon of Australian criminology,
died in Manly, New South Wales, on February 29,
2004. He was 84.
After serving from 1939 to 1945 with the 1st Assam
Rifles in India and Burma, Hawkins returned to postwar
Britain and gained a philosophy degree with distinction
from the University of Wales. Doctoral studies at Balliol
were cut short by the necessity to earn enough to support
a growing family, and he joined the British Prison
Service as an assistant governor. In 1960, Professor Ken
Shatwell, Dean of Law at Sydney University, talent-
spotted him at a prisons conference. Shatwell was keen to
establish an Institute of Criminology within the Law School, and offered Hawkins a
foundation senior lectureship. From 1961 until his retirement in 1984, Hawkins was
the leading figure among an impressive group of luminaries at the Institute, serving as
Director for many years. After his retirement, he continued to hold the position of
Senior Fellow at the Earl Warren Legal Research Institute at the University of
California, Berkeley, working there intermittently with Frank Zimring.
Hawkins’s first book, The honest politician’s guide to crime control, coauthored with
Norval Morris, was published in 1970. At 50 years of age, he was not exactly a
youthful new author. One of the remarkable things about his scholarly life was the
scale of his subsequent productivity. Eleven major books followed in the next
twenty-nine years, as well as an edited collection, some shorter monographs and a
book based on a television series that he had conceptualised around the notion of
evidentiary ambiguities and the burden of proof.
Nine of those books were written jointly with Frank Zimring, Norval Morris’s
successor as Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of
Chicago, and subsequently Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute. In their collab-
oration, Hawkins and Zimring certainly did not duck the big criminological issues of
our time. Drugs, gun control, pornography, capital punishment, deterrence, the scale of
imprisonment, the efficacy of incapacitation, the basic question of workable and realis-
tic crime policies, “Three Strikes” laws — all fell within their purview.
As might be expected from someone who had spent 10 years in the British
Prison Service, rising in that time to be deputy governor of a Category A prison,
this list is skewed a little towards imprisonment and punishment. Hawkins’ only
sole-authored book, The Prison, also reflects this expertise, as does Imprisonment in
America, coauthored with Michael Sherman.
The distinguishing characteristic of Hawkins’s approach to criminology was that
propositions should be based on empirical observations. Commenting on a criticism
that Shaw and McKay did not set out to demonstrate any explicitly formulated
sociological hypothesis, Hawkins stated:
photo by Michal Zimring
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