2020
Franklin E. Zimring
The extent, nature, variation, and causes of crime, and society’s responses to crime, especially in relation to lethal violence involving the use of firearms.
Zimring was lauded for his studies on violence, which include the relationship between access to guns and deadly violence. His research has falsified many myths, starting with the claim that guns are no more lethal than knives. He has also studied factors behind the dramatic decline in homicides and other serious crimes in the United States and other countries since the 1990s, stressing the significance of social and economic factors. He strongly opposes capital punishment, based on his research on its effects observed after abolition in multiple US states.Franklin E. Zimring
Born 1942 in the US. Franklin E. Zimring was professor at the University of California, Berkeley (United States) at the time of the award.
Showed that murder rates depend more on the availability of firearms than on general violent crime trends.Showed that murder rates depend more on the availability of firearms than on general violent crime trends.
More guns mean more deaths
Franklin E. Zimring was awarded the 2020 Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his research on the effects of gun violence and the role of the regulatory legal system in preventing crime.
His work has provided profound insights into how different gun laws yield different rates of weapons crimes. More generally, he has repeatedly showed how legal policy decisions can be shaped by evidence rather than assumptions. He has demonstrated how legal strategies can reduce injuries caused by firearms, without compromising the rule of law.
Contributes to research as a jurist
As a jurist, he has been instrumental in the development and application of the scientific field of criminology. Through comparative and empirical research, he has demonstrated how gun violence in the United States differs from other countries and has challenged the notion that stricter punishment leads automatically to less crime. Zimring has decisively shown that the structure and function of the legal system has a significant impact on criminality. His work has been of crucial importance to an entire generation of scholars and has provided policy makers with causal inference from large data sets.
Weapon determines the lethality of violence
In the mid-1960s, Zimring and his colleagues demonstrated that violence with different types of weapons resulted in varying fatality numbers per attack. He developed methods for classifying different types of assaults. His research showed that, for identical types of assault (e.g., robbery), the extent of victim injuries (including risk of victim death) varied widely depending on whether the attack was committed with a knife, rifle, pistol, or shotgun.
His further research also showed that homicide statistics in a given community had more to do with the availability of firearms than with crime volumes in general. In his book Crime is Not the Problem he showed that, although England has a higher violent crime rate than the United States, the number of deaths from violent attacks is much higher in the United States than in England due to the significantly higher number of privately owned firearms in the USA.