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Wolfgang, Marvin Eugene (1924–1998)

Marvin Eugene Wolfgang is a giant in the history of criminology. He is recognized around the world for his groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of criminal violence and juvenile delinquency and to the development of criminology as a scientific discipline. Contrary to the frequent stereotyping of “mainstream” criminologists as amoral careerists merely serving the ruling class, Marvin Wolfgang was deeply concerned with the moral issues embedded in the assessment and reaction to criminality. A lifelong opponent of capital punishment, his research on the racially biased application of the death sentence over 20 years across the South helped convince the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 (Furman v. Georgia) that state laws then in place were unconstitutional.

Wolfgang was born November 14, 1924, in Millersburg, Pennsylvania. After serving in the United States Army in Italy during World War II, he received his undergraduate degree in 1948 from Dickinson College and began teaching at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. He went on to graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, completing his doctorate in 1955 under the supervision of the internationally distinguished criminologist Thorsten Sellin. Over the half century of his tenure at Penn, Wolfgang became the founding director of the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law, for years arguably the premier facility for criminological research.

Contributions

Wolfgang was enormously influential in both producing major studies of violence and eliciting governmental and private support for violence research. One of his first contributions was a scholarly analysis of the ferocious conflict between the Guelph and Ghibelline political parties of Florence in the late 13th and early 14th centuries (1954). His doctoral research on 558 Philadelphia murders culminated in a book (1958) that revitalized the field of victimology, introducing the term victim-precipitated homicide in reporting that one in four of the homicides resulted from violent conflicts initiated by the eventual victims.

Subculture of Violence

A decade later, his collaboration with the noted Italian criminologist Franco Ferracuti produced an analysis (1967) of correlates and sources of violent behavior. The analysis explained much violence as the consequence of socialization into an environment (a “subculture of violence”) that encouraged the use of violence to resolve interpersonal and intergroup conflicts. Wolfgang served on numerous international and national bodies concerned with the reduction of criminal violence. In his role as Research Director (with James F. Short Jr.) for the 1960s Presidential Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, he was markedly successful in enlisting an impressive list of scholars to compile authoritative summary analyses of the research literature. Further, he was one of the first to promote the vision of systematic large-scale and long-range research programs to better understand violence and to develop more effective—and humane—control policies.

Measurement of Crime Seriousness

Building on Sellin's insights of some 30 years earlier, Wolfgang and Sellin grounded those insights in an empirical study (1964) that challenged the common assumption that the prevalence and incidence of criminality could be directly inferred from police and court statistics. Emphasizing the problematic and interpretative nature of criminal statistics, they argued instead that criminologists should generate their own analyses independent of the legal and extralegal factors influencing official compilations. To this end, they went directly to the investigative files of the Juvenile Aid Division of the Philadelphia Police Department and used the information to produce a multivariate index of the relative seriousness of offenses as defined primarily by the presence/absence of physical injury, property theft, and property damage. The Sellin-Wolfgang seriousness scale subsequently became the model for many replications and adaptations by researchers throughout the world.

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