Professor Peter Grabosky holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University, and has written extensively on crime control and public policy. His current interests focus on excesses of the state in regulation, crime control, and national security.More generally, he has worked on computer crime, policing, regulatory failure, and how non-governmental institutions may be harnessed in furtherance of public policy. He was the 2006 winner of the Sellin-Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology for contributions to comparative and international criminology, and the 2011 recipient of the Prix Hermann Mannheim, awarded by the International Centre of Comparative Criminology at the University of Montreal. He is a past president of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology, a former Deputy Secretary General of the International Society of Criminology, and was a Vice President of the Asian Criminological Society.

Professor Grabosky migrated to Australia from the United States of America in 1978, to become the Foundation Director of the South Australian Office of Crime Statistics. There, he established comprehensive computer databases of statistics from criminal courts, and chaired an interdepartmental committee on victims of crime. The committee charted a course for victims’ support in Australia and beyond.

In 1983, he moved to the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), where, with the exception of a two-year secondment to The Australian National University, he spent the next 18½ years. At the AIC, he served as Director of Research for the National Committee on Violence, whose report, ‘Violence: Directions for Australia’, provided a cross-sectoral, whole-of-society roadmap for the prevention and control of violence in Australia. Professor Grabosky’s later years at the AIC saw him address the newly-emerging field of computer-related crime. Written in collaboration with Russell Smith and Gregor Urbas, his books on the subject contributed to the development of policy in this field, and have received international recognition.

Professor Grabosky rose to become Deputy Director of the AIC before joining the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), now the RegNet School of Regulation and Global Governance, at The Australian National University, in 2001. As a Professor at RegNet, he was Co-Director (with Clifford Shearing) of Security 21: International Centre for Security and Justice. The Centre’s research has focused on various means of enhancing the capacity of police organisations, while ensuring equity, accountability and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of police services.

Over the course of his career, he has held a number of visiting appointments, including Russell Sage Fellow in Law and Social Science at Yale Law School (1976-78); Visiting Professor at the Institute of Comparative Law in Japan, Chuo University (1993; 2008); Visiting Expert for the United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (UNAFEI) (1995; 1998); and Visiting Professor at the Chinese People’s Public Security University (1996; 2006); and Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester, School of Law (2011). He was a Rapporteur on the Expert Working Group on Crimes Related to the Computer Network at the Tenth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Vienna (2000). From 1998 to 2002, he was President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology. He was a member of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Steering Group for for ten years from its inception in 2001, and its co-Chair (2007-2010).

Professor Grabosky’s recent books include: States and Peoples in Conflict (with Michael Stohl and Mark Lichbach) (Routledge 2017); Cybercrime (Oxford University Press 2015); Crime and Terrorism (with Michael Stohl) Sage Publications 2010); Lengthening the Arm of the Law (with Julie Ayling and Clifford Shearing) (Cambridge University Press 2009); Community Policing and Peacekeeping (CRC Press, 2009) Electronic Crime (Pearson Prentice Hall 2007); and Cyber Criminals on Trial (with Russell Smith and Gregor Urbas) (Cambridge University Press 2004). The latter book won the Distinguished Book Award of American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology.

Research interests:

• State crime
• Criminal justice
• Public policy
• Computer crime
• Policing
• Regulatory failure
• The role of non-governmental institutions in public policy
• Transparency and national security