An interesting question for scholars is: “what motivated you to study this field of inquiry?” Max Weber noted two major influences in our lives: our family socialization and our life experiences as an adult. For some, their lives are planned out by their parents, so there is continuity between their family values and those acquired once they leave the family circle. Many academicians come from families that supported their educational pursuits, allowing them to go straight from prep-school to college, earning their undergraduate degree and graduate degrees while still in their twenties, and then to continue on with careers at a college or university. Others came into academia not by some predetermined parental plan but from a more indirect route, often by accident—serendipity.
A disadvantage of this route is being ill-prepared relevant to college preparation, while the advantage is seeing things in the raw, without the values and norms held by many from the privileged elite. Raised an ethnic Catholic (French Canadian) in a northern New England parish in the 1940s and 1950s, my early socialization was quite parochial. It was only when I joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959 at age seventeen that I began to experience different cultures and the marked divide in America relevant to class, caste race, gender, regionalism, and sectarianism. Parris Island was my prep school, as was the shock of living in the segregated Jim Crow South during the time of the civil rights protests. In retrospect, I was fortunate to be assigned to a 105-howitzer gun crew with African American noncommissioned officers. They showed me how the blacks had to live in North Carolina at this time, taking me to their homes and communities. Indeed, the marine corps was a safer and more equitable world for them than the rest of the South during the Jim Crow era.
Tours with the Sixth Fleet during the Algerian and Congo crises, and later in 1961 in Cuba during Detachment Alpha, exposed me to other cultures and conflicts at this time. This was followed by a tour with the Third Marine Division on occupied Okinawa, with deployments to the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and, later, Hawaii while in the reserves. It was while in Hawaii that I was processed for college under the disabled component of the GI Bill, which coincided with my honorable discharge in February 1965. Since it was mid-term for the academic year, the Veterans Administration (VA) sent me to the Church College of Hawaii (now Brigham Young University–Hawaii campus). This was fortuitous for me in that I really needed the one-on-one supervision and orientation provided by the Church College faculty given that I was not part of the college-prep curriculum while in high school. A requirement for non-Mormons was taking a course on the Mormon religion—a course that did not transfer to either the University of Hawaii or the University of New Hampshire. Nonetheless, it was intriguing for me to learn another sectarian worldview, even if it was one that blatantly discriminated against blacks and American Indians (I received an A in the course). Later experiences in Indian Country led me to rephrase the term LDS (Latter Day Saints) to LDP (Latter Day Puritans) due to the intensity of their efforts at cultural genocide among American Indian groups, one that matched the intensity of colonial New England. The VA then transferred me to the University of Hawaii for the following academic year. This experience exposed me to the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, as well as with the Fijians, Samoans, and Tongans at the Polynesian Cultural Center at the Church College.
I took this cultural orientation back home with me when I transferred to the University of New Hampshire in 1966. Although a predominately white university, I was fortunate to be mentored by Stuart Hunter Palmer, a noted criminologist and social psychologist with his doctorate from Yale, who exposed me to the Human Relations Area File. Palmer was widely recognized for his cross-cultural studies, especially on the psychology of aggression. John (Jack) A. Humphrey and I became graduate assistants for Palmer, who introduced us to some of the leading criminologists at the time, including Gresham Sykes and Thorsten Sellin. Dr. Palmer was a member of the NH Governor’s Crime Commission that distributed LEAA funds to local law enforcement agencies. He had both Jack and I assisting in the evaluations of these projects. Jack and I both got teaching positions as criminologists within the University of North Carolina system beginning in 1972—Jack at UNC–Greensboro and me at Western Carolina University (WCU). WCU was only twenty-six miles from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian, Qualla Boundary reservation, offering me opportunities for mentoring, research, and community service with the Cherokees. Soon after my arrival, Cherokee students encouraged me to represent them as the faculty advisor to the WCU Cherokee Native American Student Organization. During this time, an influx of Vietnam veterans was enrolled at WCU, and given my USMC experience, they requested that I be the faculty advisor to the Veteran’s Organization. I later became the co-faculty advisor for the WCU Organization of Ebony Students and served as a mental health consultant to both the Cherokee Mental Health and Alcohol Program and the North Carolina Department of Mental Health.
My research grew from these experiences, including attending the 1974 East Coast Conference of Socialist Sociologists. It was here that I met Richard Quinney. Four of us drove from North Carolina to New Jersey during the gas crisis to attend the conference. I was later notified by the WCU provost that this activity was frowned upon and that it would be a mark against future tenure considerations. Adding to this situation was my participation in the 1975 Second Annual Conference on Blacks and the Criminal Justice System held at the University of Alabama. Governor George Wallace, confined to a wheelchair, personally welcomed us to the conference. I was fortunate to have Jack introduce me to Dr. Joseph Sandy Himes, the noted black (blind) sociologist at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro, who soon became my mentor relevant to social injustices afflicting both African Americans and American Indians at this time (1972–1977). Dr. Himes was instrumental in getting me the position of organizer and presider for the “American Indian Session” at the 71st American Sociological Association (ASA) conference held in New York City in 1976. Jack also introduced me to Dr. Harriet J. Kupferer, also on the UNC–Greensboro faculty, who had conducted research with Indians of the southeast. She also got Jack and me involved with the Southern Anthropological Society, which became a welcomed venue for our research, presentations, and publications.
In addition to presenting at the American Sociological Association (ASA) conferences (1974, 1975, 1976, 1977) and the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) meetings, I made my initial presentation with the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) in 1978 and joined the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in 1975, becoming a life member in 1976. During my time at WCU, I became involved in a tribal police issue involving the deaths of returning Cherokee Vietnam veterans who were arrested on the reservation for public drunkenness but incarcerated in the white county jail. Our Cherokee student organization sought and received the assistance of the leaders of the American Indian Historical Society, Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry-Costo, who got the U.S. Civil Right Commission to investigate these three deaths. This inquiry resulted in the tribal police being cross-deputized with the U.S. Marshals, ending the need to transport Indian offenders off the reservation into often hostile white jurisdictions. Also, at this time I became involved in the plight of black female inmates incarcerated in North Carolina, including the Joann Little case. This involvement, coupled with the dismantling of the sociology and anthropology department at WCU in favor of the Reagan-style “cop shop” format, resulted in the termination of my employment within the University of North Carolina system.
Nonetheless, Dr. Himes was influential in getting me connected with an emerging group of minority scholars, the National Association of Interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies (NAIES) for Native American, Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian groups, where I was fortunate to interact with Dennis Banks, Vine Deloria Jr, his aunt, Bea Medicine, and Angela Davis, among others, in an attempt to provide a voice, often absent, within the mainstream academic disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, criminology, and criminal justice. Dr. Himes also introduced me to the emerging Southern Poverty Law Center, which became a major vehicle for litigating minority social injustices, especially in the South. I took these influences with me to my new appointment as an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska–Omaha (UNO), on the Lincoln campus (1977–1980).
In 1978, I shared an office with Chris Eskridge, who had just finished his PhD at Ohio State University. Also on the Lincoln campus was Julie Horney. The chair of the department, Vincent (Vince) Webb, and his close associate, Samuel (Sam) Walker, resided on the Omaha campus. This was the time of Wounded Knee II and the most intense white–Indian relations in Nebraska and the Dakotas since the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890s. My involvement with NAIES and the American Indian Historical Society resulted in my continued work within Indian Country, this time with the Sioux nations battling social injustices and police brutality (e.g., Wilson’s GOONS, local white sheriffs). My work with the Nebraska Indian Commission also introduced me to the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and the suit against the Nebraska penal system relevant to adequate access to cultural and religious resources for incarcerated Indian inmates. Here the consent decree allowed the Indian inmates to practice their traditional ways, including dress and hair style as well as having sweat lodges constructed on the prison grounds and having medicine men attend to their spiritual needs. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) campus had a small core of activists interested in these issues, including several American Indian faculty, notably, Webster Robbins and Teresa LaFromboise, both in the educational psychology department. A number of white faculty members were also involved in the development of a new Lincoln Indian Center, most notably Elizabeth S. Grobsmith in the anthropology department. At this time, the Omaha campus hired a black attorney, Carolyn Watkins Marsh, and an American Indian professor, John Cross (Western Seminole tribe). These intense times coincided with the 1978 U.S. Department of Justice’s LEAA efforts to develop a minority curriculum within criminal justice programs, known as the SUNY Project. I became a member of the project, representing American Indians independent of Vince Webb’s involvement as a “core major faculty.” The Hoover/Anslinger/Wolfgang racist “cop shop” perspective became readily evident as the meetings proceeded at the State University of New York at Albany, resulting in a backlash among the minority faculty. Clearly, Vince Webb was part of the Wolfgang camp where elitist whites condescended to the Black, Hispanic, and Asian faculty. This rebellion resulted in a major challenge to the long-standing criminal justice perspective on minority justice.
Nonetheless, the Hoover/Anslinger/Wolfgang racist perspective continued to dominate both the ACJS and ASC for years to come. Carolyn Marsh, John Cross, and I challenged Webb’s “good-ole boy” white autocratic dominance in the UNO Department of Criminal Justice program, filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), Department of Education, in 1980 resulting in a sixteen-point corrective action “voluntary compliant agreement” consent decree. And although item four of the agreement stated that “The Recipient agrees that there shall be no discriminations or retaliation against any person affected by or involved in filing the complaint,” Professors Marsh, Cross, and I were nonetheless terminated, and Dr. Webb continued to run the criminal justice program at UNO, including its Lincoln campus where Dr. Eskridge and Horney were located.
Seeking support from other faculty, notably Christ Eskridge, Julie Horney, and Samuel Walker, none was forthcoming. In retrospect, this became an excellent career move for all three. Chris Eskridge continued his move within the American Society of Criminology by ingratiating himself with Sarah Hall, the ASC executive administrator, becoming indispensable and later moving up to the ASC director position where he was able to impose some of his Mormon values on the organization, such as replacing “wine socials” with “ice-cream socials.” And by avoiding getting involved in the American Indian Movement controversy playing out in his academic patch, Chris was able to use his ex-official ASC position to promote the Wolfgang/Webb perspective internationally. Indeed, Eskridge proudly proclaims himself, “the jet-setting UNL professor promoting criminology internationally.” Julie Horney, brought up among the white elite during North Carolina’s Jim Crow era, divorced and married Vince Webb, and later became dean of the same SUNY-A program that sponsored the failed LEAA minority justice program. She also became fellow and president of the ASC. Dr. Horney died unexpectedly while vacationing in Mexico in October 2016. Sam Walker’s academic career also blossomed with his close association with Vince Webb, gaining recognition for his expertise in policing. Ironically, among his awards is the “W. E. B. Du Bois Award for contributions to the field of Criminal Justice on race and ethnicity” from the Western Society of Criminology in 2011. However, the person who benefitted the most from his strong adherence to the Hoover/Anslinger/Wolfgang perspective was Vincent J. Webb, who, despite the consent decree reflective of the racial biases in the program he directed, received the “UNO Chancellor’s Medal for Outstanding Service” in 1993. He remained chairman of the UNO criminal justice program until 1996 and went on to head other criminal justice programs: Department of Administration of Justice, Arizona State University–West (1996–2003), and most recently, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas. He also served a term as president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Marsh, French, and Cross were effectively black listed within criminal justice. Carolyn Marsh went back to her legal practice working with federal prisoners in California, while John Cross joined the sociology faculty at Oklahoma State University where he served as editor of Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology. I retrained in the clinical field, earning a doctorate from UNL in educational psychology and measurement majoring in cultural psychology.
The battle for getting minority and gender recognition within the ASC and ACJS was a long and difficult process, one that Sloan Letman and I pursued despite our status as “outsiders.” Sloan Letman came from a noted family of black ministers. When we met in the 1970s, he was the dean and member of the faculty at Loyola University of Chicago. He later went on to teach at the University of Illinois, Chicago–Circle. Sloan and I represented a small core of faculty interested in better promoting the minority perspective within the criminal justice system at both the academic and practitioner levels. Another organization that promoted this cause was the Society of Police and Criminal Psychology and book publisher Michael (Mickey) C. Braswell, who published our 1981 manuscript, Contemporary Issues in Corrections. Sloan T. Letman III died in 2015.
My retraining in psychology took me back to New Hampshire where I worked for nine years (1980–1989) as a staff psychologist for the state of New Hampshire, including that as a forensic psychologist. Part of these duties was training law enforcement in how to handle the growing population of deinstitutionalized mental patients, including those with a potential for violent impulse behaviors. My duties also involved forensic assessments, conducted with Dr. Paul Emery, a forensic psychiatrist. We tested clients relevant to their competency to stand trial and/or to their degree of dangerousness, including dangerous sexual offenders. We had the advantage of current research and protocols being developed at Dartmouth Medical School in conjunction with other prominent universities in the region, including the work on paraphilics being done at Johns Hopkins University.
I went back to academia in the fall of 1989 with a psychology teaching and research position at Western New Mexico University (WNMU), where I also served as the police psychologist for the police academy. The challenge here was fitting the MMPI to the three major sectarian or cultural groups represented in the state and region—Protestant/Mormon Anglos, Catholic Hispanics of Mexican heritage, and American Indians (e.g., Pueblos, Navajos, and Apache). Sorting the aggregate MMPI profiles by ethnicity and gender, I was able to develop an adaptive cultural profile with strong predictive features (the results were published in a number of journals). Awareness of unique cultural and/or sectarian variances was also a helpful teaching and clinical tool in that I also had a clinical practice in Arizona in a region that also included the San Carlos Indian Reservation. My clinical practice with the Arizona Department of Economic Security often lead to sectarian challenges from LDS leaders and officials, including testing clients in Sheriff Richard Mack’s jail. Many officials I encountered were adamant that Mormon men did not harbor aberrant sexual thoughts let alone behaviors. And despite a seemingly high percentage of bulimic girls and teens, church officials and family members often claimed that the problem within LDS families was colitis and not a clinical syndrome like bulimia or anorexia. These cultural barriers forced me to conduct thorough neurological, forensic, and clinical assessments that could easily be verified and replicated by other competent clinicians. Cultural testing was also needed to discern when test results indicated low intelligence when, in fact, this may have been a language barrier relevant to the test norms. This was the case especially with Hispanic and American Indian clients where English was not their primary language.
I continued to be involved in criminal and social justice issues during my tenure at WNMU, including being the program committee chair for Native American sessions and local arrangements chair at the 1998 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences annual meeting held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during Dr. “Gerry” Vito’s term as ACJS president. We had sixteen American Indian sessions, a first within the ACJS or ASC conferences to date. This success was due to Dr. Vito’s efforts to bring minority issues into the criminal justice academic arena. Also, during this time, Professors Frank (Trey) P. Williams and Marilyn McShane were developing a unique juvenile justice doctoral program at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, one with a viable minority perspective producing quality minority graduates. This change came about due to a legal challenge with Texas A&M University located a mere forty miles away, which long established itself as the “flag ship” institution for the entire Texas A&M system when, in fact, both facilities at College Station and Prairie View were created on the same date in 1876 as land-grant institutions, one for whites and the other for “freedmen.” The resulting “consent decree” established Prairie View as the “co-flag ship” institution with resources now allocated for the development of viable doctorate programs. Dr. Williams and McShane were instrumental in developing the doctoral program in juvenile justice.
Another change within academic justice programs was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 with newly liberated countries vying for Western attention. Patrick Lynch at John Jay College in NYC quickly filled this void with his biennial international conferences. My WNMU colleague, Magdaleno Manzanarez, and I were fortunate to attend the fourth (Budapest, Hungry, 1998), fifth (Bologna, Italy, 2000), and sixth (London, England, 2002) of these conferences. At the same time, the International Police Executive Symposium (IPES) was convening international conferences. I participated in the ones in Szcytno, Poland (2001); Prague, Czech Republic (2005); Ohrid, Macedonia (2009); and Sofia, Bulgaria (2014). There was also the first Key Issues Conference, Societies of Criminology held in Paris, France, in 2004. A common theme at these international conferences is the challenges surrounding policing, including adequate community policing and the fair treatment of minority members of society. These challenges continue today, not only in former communist countries (Society Union, Yugoslavia) and emerging democracies, but in the United States; thus, the need for works like this one that address these issues from more than the “cop shop” academic perspective.
Laurence Armand French, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Western New Mexico University
Affiliate Professor, Justice Studies, University of New Hampshire