Empey, Lamar Taylor (1923–)

Career Highlights

Empey's first teaching position was at BYU, where he was in the sociology department from 1955 to 1962. He left there to teach at the University of Southern California (USC) and remained there the rest of his professional career, retiring as professor emeritus.

Throughout his career, Empey focused on the study of youth. He authored many books and articles on delinquency, although he is perhaps best known for evaluation studies of the Silverlake and Provo Experiments as well as his textbook, American Delinquency (1978), which has been the standard for the discipline. Now in its fourth edition, the work is currently coauthored by Mark Stafford and Carter Hay.

For Empey, the way children have been viewed and treated throughout history has varied according to whatever the current thinking was on acceptable and deviant behavior. Our responses, he argued, have evolved in formal as well as informal reactions to delinquency that have met with controversial degrees of success. For him, the historical context was important to understand the assumptions that underlie our practices and beliefs about interventions, particularly in the juvenile court. The cultural relativity of Western responses was important to Empey, and he strove to demonstrate how our theories, while varied, reflect interests and concerns basic to our society, such as our belief in due process and the desirability of community programming.

While at USC, Empey served on the research advisory committee of the California Department of Mental Hygiene and as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor. He worked on many grants and evaluation projects and was Director of the Youth Studies Center at USC as well as Associate Research Director of the Gerontology Center.

Environmental Interests

After retirement, Empey moved to Wyoming and became active in environmental issues. He and his wife founded the Clarks Fork Coalition, which led a successful effort to have the Clarks Fork River designated as wild and scenic. He was a board member of the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the Greater [Page 152]Yellowstone Coalition. His commitment to grassroots activism only intensified when he lost his son-in-law, an avid outdoorsman, to a climbing accident in the Grand Tetons.

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