Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences
association
The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) is an international association established in 1963 to foster professional and scholarly activities in the field of criminal justice and criminology. ACJS promotes criminal justice and criminology education, policy analysis, and research for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Its national office is located in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in the US.
Purpose
The purpose of ACJS is to promote a forum for disseminating ideas related to issues in education, policy, practice, and research within the field of criminal justice and criminology.
History
By the early 1960s, the American Society of Criminology (ASC), as an organization, had become more focused on the sociological theories of crime causation. Those who had helped to create the organization in order to represent higher education in policing felt left behind. The police professors felt separated from the theoreticians, and they began to discuss amongst themselves what options were available to them. Because there were no longer enough police professors to change ASC from within, as evidenced by the Denver ASC conference, the police professors needed a catalyst for bringing them together to form a new organization. That catalyst came in the retirement of Professor V. A. Leonard from Washington State College (now Washington State University-Pullman). After acknowledging Leonard's retirement, discussion turned to the best way to recognize both Vollmer and Leonard's legacy and the answer was the creation of a new organization, one that was rooted more closely to police science than theoretical criminology: a new organization of police professors. The retirement party for V. A. Leonard in Pullman, Washington, had turned into the first annual conference of the new organization: The International Association of Police Professors (IAPP).
“Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences” enters the record as association. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Academy, Criminal and Justice can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20857791. VIAF identifies the subject as 149585521. The Library of Congress control number is n79055133. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.