Roger Hood: Professor who believed criminology could make an impact beyond the walls of academia

Professor Roger Hood, who has died aged 84, was an eminent criminologist known for his work on parole, ethnicity, and the death penalty. He believed the study of criminology should not remain isolated within the domain of academia but should be deployed to bring real change in the wider world.

Hood was born in Bristol in 1936, the son of Phyllis and Ronald, a stockbroker’s dealer. He was educated at King Edward VI Five Ways School, Birmingham, where he captained the rugby first team. After winning a scholarship to read sociology at the London School of Economics, he completed a PhD on homeless borstal boys at the University of Cambridge. In 1963, the year he finished his studies, Hood became a lecturer at the University of Durham.

He went on to join the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, where he worked with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in 1967. Inspired by that experience, he moved to Oxford in 1973. Building on Professor Nigel Walker’s Oxford Penal Research Unit, Hood became founding director of the Oxford Centre for Criminology, which he led for the next 30 years.

In his teaching on sentencing, Hood favoured a direct approach, whereby students could learn about jail from prisoners themselves at the nearby Oxford Prison. Faculty at Oxford spoke of how his “fatherly warmth, limitless attention to detail, and constant care for his students’ welfare made the difficult path towards academic maturity much easier to climb”.

Hood’s criminological research had three main strands: parole, with Professor Stephen Shute; race and sentencing; and the death penalty, which although abolished in Britain in the mid-1960s is still in force in many countries.

Hood’s interest in parole began in the early 1970s when he served for two years as a member of the Parole Board for England and Wales under its first chair, Lord Hunt. In the late 1980s he became a member of Lord Carlisle of Bucklow’s review of parole and in the early 1990s teamed up with Shute for three influential research studies of parole decision-making. Among their recommendations, Hood and Shute argued that parole assessments would be improved if actuarial risk prediction scores played a greater part.

Hood and Shute’s third report, The Parole System at Work: A Study of Risk Based Decision-making, published in 2000, formed the basis of the government’s 2001 Comprehensive Review of Parole. It also prompted a similar review to be commissioned in Scotland. The research was later cited by the Court of Appeal in litigation involving the Parole Board in 2008.

Hood’s landmark research on ethnicity and the criminal courts began with his 1992 study, Race and Sentencing. He analysed more than 3,000 sentencing decisions at five crown court centres across the West Midlands and found evidence of possible racial discrimination.

A decade later he again teamed up with Shute to complete another substantial study of ethnicity, this time focusing on perceptions of fairness and equality of treatment. The research involved both court observations and 1,500 interviews with minority ethnic and white defendants and witnesses, judges, magistrates, court staff, and lawyers. Published in 2005 in a book entitled A Fair Hearing? Ethnic Minorities in the Criminal Courts, one of Hood and Shute’s central recommendations was that written transcripts of judges’ sentencing remarks should be made available to all sentenced offenders, a proposal which was taken up by David Lammy’s review in 2017.

Following retirement from the University of Oxford in 2003, Hood worked extensively with Parvais Jabbar, Saul Lehrfreund and Florence Seemungal of the Death Penalty Project. He travelled widely, lecturing on the case for abolition.

Hood was a founding member of the Judicial Studies Board (1979-1985) and served as president of the British Society of Criminology (1986-1989). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1992 and awarded a CBE in 1995 for services to the study of criminology. He received honorary degrees from the University of Birmingham (2008) and Edinburgh Napier University (2011) and was made an honorary Queen’s counsel in 2000. In 2012, the European Society of Criminology recognised his “lifetime contribution as a European criminologist”.

Hood remained active in his research and writing until the end of his life. He had recently completed a report on the death penalty in the Caribbean, Sentenced to Death Without Execution. Interviews with 100 opinion formers amongst the judiciary and lawyers – to determine if and why they still supported capital punishment – revealed a 52:48 ratio in favour of abolition.

Professor Carolyn Hoyle and Professor Lucia Zedner at the University of Oxford paid tribute to Hood, saying: “Many of the current members of the Centre for Criminology owe Roger an immense personal and professional debt. He taught us, advised us and inspired us. He was held in the same high regard at his college, All Souls, where he never tired of encouraging younger scholars, while developing, over his many decades there, friends for life.”

His wife Nancy Stebbing, whom he married in 1985, died last year. He is survived by his daughter Cathy from his first marriage to Barbara Young, and by three stepchildren, Zoe, Clare and David.

Professor Roger Hood, academic and campaigner, born 12 June 1936, died 17 November 2020