Editorial Guest Editors’ Introduction: Research in Honor of Gresham Sykes Heith Copes 1 and Paul M. Klenowski 2 On October 29, 2010, criminology lost one of its pioneers. Gresham M’Cready Sykes (known as Grex to friends and family) was a true luminary. His insights about those who commit crime (i.e., techniques of neutralization) and the ways that prison affects the incarcerated (i.e., pains of imprisonment) have shaped the discipline for over half a century and will undoubtedly continue to do so. This special issue of Criminal Justice Review is a tribute to his creative capacity and academic insights. While we could have focused on any number of his works, we have decided to devote this issue to work that was inspired by his classic article, ‘‘Techniques of Neutralization’’ (Sykes & Matza, 1957). We believe that focusing on neutralization theory is most fitting for this special issue because this short and eloquent work is arguably his greatest contribution to the discipline, although a strong argument could be made for his insights on the pains of imprisonment. 1 In addition, this work has greatly shaped our own view of offenders and has guided much of our research. Although Sykes was a sociologist by training he believed strongly that limiting the study of crime to a single discipline or methodology was misguided. According to his wife, Carla Sykes: 2 He became disenchanted with academia and even with the way in which sociology seemed to be moving. He had always harbored a secret hope that sociologists would begin to use some of the tools developed by anthropologists to learn more about human behavior.... He was extremely unhappy with the politics found in the academy, the infighting between supposed colleagues, and most notably the narrow- mindedness of scholars in the field who were unwilling to look to other disciplines for answers to the crime question (C. Sykes, personal communication, July 15, 2012). With this perspective in mind, our goal in organizing this issue was to bring together research from varying theoretical (e.g., psychological, sociological, and criminological) and methodological (e.g., quantitative and qualitative) perspectives that were tied together and inspired by his insights about how those who commit crime use neutralization techniques to carry out their crimes free from guilt or negative self-images. 1 University of Alabama Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA 2 Venango College, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Oil City, PA, USA Corresponding Author: Heith Copes, University of Alabama Birmingham, 1201 University Boulevard, Birmingham, AL 35294, USA Email: jhcopes@uab.edu Criminal Justice Review 37(4) 433-436 ª 2012 Georgia State University Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0734016812465619 http://cjr.sagepub.com by guest on March 15, 2016 cjr.sagepub.com Downloaded from