Reckless, Walter C. (1899–1988)

Walter Cade Reckless was a pioneer in the sociological study of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice. He advocated the importance of structural variables in understanding adolescent misbehavior at a time when most legal and behavioral analysts emphasized individual factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Throughout his long and productive career as a teacher and researcher, Reckless never wavered from his belief that “problem children” are the products of faulty socialization that can be modified in the right environment. This conviction was the basis of his commitment to social reform and activism intended to prevent crime and delinquency in the young, while offering the opportunity for behavioral change to those already labeled as lawbreakers.

Walter Reckless was born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Chicago. After completing an undergraduate history major in 1921, he was offered a graduate assistantship in the Department of Sociology and an opportunity to work with Robert Park and Ernest Burgess. These noted scholars were then conducting a series of studies of social problems in Chicago using the participant observer method. This approach appealed to Reckless, who, as an accomplished violinist, was earning extra funds playing his instrument in a roadhouse and observing various types of vice and law violation. This led to his doctoral dissertation, a study of prostitution titled Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago (1925). A year before receiving his doctoral degree, he accepted the position of Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, where he remained until 1940. He was then lured to Ohio State University, accepting a professorship in the Department of Social Work with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology. He moved to Sociology on a full-time basis in 1958 and remained until he retired in 1969. During his 29 years at Ohio State, he built a criminology program that attracted students from around the world, and he trained many academics and practioners who have played instrumental roles in criminological research and correctional reform. In the 1960s, he revived a moribund American Society of Criminology, serving as President for three terms and seeing it become the discipline's premier professional association.