Barry Latzer

Barry Latzer is an American criminologist, legal scholar, and professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His research connects criminal law, constitutional interpretation, capital punishment, and the history of violence in the United States. The Roots of Violent Crime in America, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2021, carries the subtitle From the Gilded Age through the Great Depression. Latzer draws on historical scholarship, original analysis, and crime data to compare cities, the rural South, and the West between the 1880s and 1930s. He emphasizes regional cultures, demographic change, policing, firearms, and Prohibition instead of reducing violence to one cause. The book extends the inquiry of his earlier The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. His training in political science and law also informs studies of state constitutional criminal law and Supreme Court death penalty cases. That legal background gives his historical writing a distinctive institutional focus, linking crime patterns to public authority, social change, and regional practice across several transformative decades of American history.