The illustrious career of Albert J. Reiss, Jr., spanned half a century. As a professor of the Yale University Department of Sociology, Reiss built an international reputation on his ground-breaking sociological research, starting with a 1967 study of police behavior. In subsequent decades, his teaching and scholarship illuminated a wide variety of subjects, ranging from social organization to deviant behavior and social control. Frequently associated with the National Institute of Justice, he led major national research projects.

Reiss earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1949 and later joined the sociology department at Yale University. During the mid-1960s, receiving a grant to study police behavior from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, he sent observers along for random rides with police officers in three cities. They compiled detailed data, and Reiss analyzed it in the 1967 report, Studies on Crime and Law Enforcement...