Moskos ’94: Cop returns to academia

Currently an associate professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the City University of New York, Moskos traveled to Baltimore to study street crime firsthand for his research while in graduate school at Harvard. He first planned to accompany police officers as a researcher, but an administrative issue forced him to choose between heading back to Harvard or becoming a real cop. He chose the latter. Moskos would spend over a year as a uniformed patrol officer in Baltimore’s Eastern District, one of Baltimore’s roughest neighborhoods.

The experience — recounted in his 2008 book “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District” — has since helped shape his research on some of the nation’s most pressing criminal justice problems.

Though Moskos’s father was a prominent sociologist himself — he was the main author of the Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — Moskos said that he never felt pressured into going into sociology or academia. Nevertheless, Moskos would go on to major in sociology and write his thesis on a topic close to his father’s research interests. Entitled “It pays to be straight: The Occupations and Lesser Incomes of Gay Men in America,” his thesis found that gay men often earned significantly less in the workplace and were in fewer managerial roles compared to their straight counterparts.

Moskos said he found the University a different, uncomfortable environment.

“I was not particularly happy at Princeton,” he said, explaining that he felt much of the student body came from a “New England prep school culture” that he was not used to. He said that he appreciated the greater level of ethnic and economic diversity that characterized the public high school he attended in his hometown of Evanston, Ill.

“Although he came from an academic family, he felt more like a regular guy,” said Jim Greer ’95, who first met Moskos after they lived across from each other in Forbes College his freshman year.

According to Greer, Moskos especially enjoyed working in the kitchen in Forbes and Terrace Club, where he was able to connect with people from the “real world” and met a lot of the people who would become his close friends. Though he was first a member of the Princeton Tower Club, he eventually switched to Terrace and said that he felt most at home there.

Sociology professor Howard Taylor, who advised Moskos’ junior paper and co-chaired his thesis, said Moskos was a “star student” and that he appreciated the research that Moskos has done since his graduation from the University.

After his years at Princeton and Harvard, Moskos found himself in the Eastern District, patrolling the streets. Greer said that unlike what many people might suspect from a Harvard graduate student, he felt Moskos fit in very naturally with the police officers in Baltimore and never made them feel like test subjects for his research.

“They never felt like lab rats,” Greer said.

Moskos said he valued his time working on the street, arguing that many academics who spend little to no time in the real world can miss out on the big picture. Pointing to the unexpected crime drop in New York in the mid-1990s, he argued that theoretical evidence developed by academics can’t always predict the future.

Taylor said that he respected Moskos for taking his research directly to the streets without reluctance and explained that he felt Moskos had mastered the field of participant observation research.

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“It was one of the best pieces of research in the field that I’d seen,” Taylor said of the book that resulted from his former student’s year on the streets. While his own research tends to be more quantitative, Taylor said that their field is improved by both empirical and subjective approaches.

Moskos said he felt that much of the time spent by police officers in the city arresting individual dealers was wasted. He equated such actions to “putting out brushfires” while ignoring the larger issues that are to blame. Moskos said that he saw the legalization of drugs, including harder varieties like heroin and cocaine, as the best way to put an end to the war on drugs.

“If people brought drugs from their friends, families and coworkers like they’re supposed to then there wouldn’t be a problem,” Moskos said. He pointed out that the majority of crime centers around the illegal public selling of drugs, something that would go away if they were broadly legalized and regulated.

In addition to legalizing drugs, Moskos also argued that the United States should consider re-implementing corporal punishment as an alternative to prison sentences. In his second book “In Defense of Flogging,” he acknowledged that punishments like lashings are seen as cruel and unusual but argued that the current state of our prison system could be seen as equally so.

“When criminals are given the choice, most would choose corporal punishment [over prison], he said. “That tells you a lot about the state of our prison system.”

Moskos said he was initially afraid that the book wouldn’t be taken seriously but that he was surprised by the positive reaction he got from most people.

“I just wanted to throw a hand grenade into the debate,” Moskos said. He said that, while he doesn’t anticipate flogging coming back anytime soon, he hoped his book would spark a public debate over an issue he sees as a serious moral concern that’s been largely ignored.

Taylor said Moskos’ take on corporal punishment was an intriguing argument and while many might disagree with it, it’s often a good thing for policy recommendations to be progressive.

“He’s an uncommonly bright guy,” added Taylor. “He’s building a strong reputation very quickly.”