John Irwin   1929 - 2010  John Irwin John Irwin, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University (SFSU), passed away January 3, 2010. After a conviction for armed robbery and serving a five year sentence in California’s prison system, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. Irwin taught Sociology and Criminology at SFSU for 27 years. In prison he discovered that deviants and convicts were mostly ordinary human beings. This insight, not entirely appreciated by many academics who study crime and criminals, guided all of his academic and political activities. His considerable research on prisons included six books. The first four books, The Felon, Prisons in Turmoil, The Jail, and It’s About Time: America’s Imprisonment Binge (with James Austin), are already considered to be classics. His most recent books, The Warehouse Prison, and Lifers: Seeking Redemption in Prison have also been well received by the academic and policy community. He was also one of the contributing authors to the American Friends Service Committee’s influential report Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America. While Irwin has contributed to many community programs over the years, he is best known for creating Project Rebound at SFSU in 1967. Project Rebound is a program that provides comprehensive support for ex-convicts to enter and complete degrees at SFSU. Over the last 40 years, many Project Rebound students have obtained BA, MA, and PhD degrees in various disciplines. As an organizer and leader of the Prisoners’ Union in California, he worked closely with the California legislature on the Uniform Sentencing Act passed in 1976. He received the August Vollmer award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) for outstanding contributions to criminal justice. John also served on the Board of Directors for the JFA Institute and the Sentencing Project. John was one of the founding members of the Convict Criminology Theoretical Perspective. John has been a friend, mentor, and inspiration to many people in the Convict Criminology Group. He has been instrumental in helping many ex-convicts and non-convicts in their careers. John helped begin Convict Criminology in the 1990s. He said it has always been his dream to have a group of ex-convict academics to write together. But there were so few, until the war on drugs and the dramatic growth in prison populations that occurred in the 1980's and 1990's. Since our very first Convict Criminology Session at ASC in 1997, John has participated in nearly every session. This has included as many as six and seven sessions the last few years. He came to ASC to see the cons and prisoner rights advocates, to help our group grow and prosper. Personally, we found his wise counsel and sincere friendship to be invaluable. Each time we introduced John to a new member of the group he would spend time with him or her. John recognized that each of the ex-con graduate students and new PhDs was a small miracle. John, we will miss you... Submitted by Stephen C. Richards, Jeffrey Ian Ross, and Bob Grigsby January 5, 2010 Enter Convict Criminology