David C. Pyrooz

David Pyrooz is a California native, born in the Bay Area and raised in the Central Valley. He attended Fresno State, receiving his BS and MS degrees in Criminology. He earned his PhD from Arizona State University in 2012, and was part of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice’s inaugural cohort of doctoral students.

Prior to joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2015, Pyrooz was a faculty member at Sam Houston State University in Texas. He is a criminologist who studies the etiology of and responses to crime. His primary areas of research focus on gangs and criminal networks, incarceration and prisoner reentry, developmental and life-course criminology, and criminal justice policy and practice.

Pyrooz has published numerous books, articles, and opinion editorials. His recent books include Competing for Control: Gangs and the Social Order of Prisons (Cambridge, 2019), The Wiley Handbook of Gangs (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), and Confronting Gangs: Crime and Community (Oxford, 2014). His articles appear in leading social science outlets in criminology and related fields. Pyrooz has also written opinion editorials on gang databases, getting out of gangs, police shootings, solitary confinement, protest movements, and mass violence, which appear in The Conversation, The Crime Report, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

He has been a lead investigator on studies that have been supported with over $2.5m in funding from federal, state, local, and foundation agencies. Much of his research involves interview-based surveys with justice-involved populations, such as prisoners, gang members, extremists, and adolescents. These studies have supported the advancement of numerous undergraduate and graduate students who maintain interests in criminology.

Leading research groups have recognized him with prestigious awards: as a doctoral student he was named a graduate research fellow by the National Institute of Justice; in 2015 he was awarded the inaugural new scholar award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences; in 2016 the American Society of Criminology awarded him the Ruth Shonle Cavan young scholar award; in 2018 he received the Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Colorado Boulder.