When Professor Kathleen Daly was awarded the American Society of Criminology’s 2024 Edwin H. Sutherland Award, it marked a defining moment in an already exceptional career.

For decades, the Griffith Criminology Institute Professor has been a leading voice pushing criminology to confront blind spots – gender, race, institutional power, historical injustice – and to think more expansively about what justice means.

“One contribution I’ve sought to make is creating a more adventurous criminology in terms of topics and areas of research,” she said.

“I’m glad I got the award to be able to write the paper. It was a major undertaking and I’m proud of it.”

The Edwin H. Sutherland Award, given by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), recognises outstanding contributions to criminology theory or research, honouring influential scholars.

Since its creation in 1960, the award has been given to only 63 scholars and to just seven women – placing Daly in a very small circle of criminologists whose work is considered foundational to the discipline.

The award honours not only her body of work, but a career spent reshaping how the world understands justice.

Key insights from Justice: word, idea, practice

At the centre of this recognition is Daly’s new article, ‘Justice: word, idea, practice’, a sweeping re-examination of one of the most invoked concepts in public life.

“If there’s one thing I try to do in my writing, it is to clarify the clutter of confusion, of words that don’t make sense but are ideologically convenient,” she says.

“What I would like people to think about is this: the next time they use the word justice or injustice or social justice – what are they saying, what are they talking about exactly?”

A key contribution of Daly’s article is drawing a distinction between macrolevel understandings of justice (distributive justice) in political philosophy and mesolevel understandings of justice as rectification (criminal and civil justice) in penal philosophy, law, and social science.

“If you look at papers published in the journal Criminology in the last five years, this one is unusual.  It’s entirely theoretical and philosophical, and I decided to undertake it to work out a problem I’ve had for years: relating societal-level inequalities to criminal justice practices,” she said.

In her paper, she calls attention to “unresolved disconnects” in macrolevel and mesolevel “understandings of justice and … proposes the abandonment of ideal theories and construct of distribution of benefits and burdens in philosophy in favour of nonideal theories and societal inequalities or injustices.”

The “review of criminal, civil, and restorative justice identifies limits on what each can achieve and discusses the compromised character of criminal justice in unjust societies.”

When comparing the fields of institutional, historical, and transitional justice, [she identifies] “distinctive questions for justice and obstacles for victims and society.”

“I see justice as having two major registers of societal relations – macro and meso,” Professor Daly reiterates.

“The macrolevel is inequalities and how people talk about that in terms of what is right and just at a societal level – what is a just society. But most day-to-day understanding of justice are mesolevel practices – what happens in criminal justice, civil justice, and rectification more generally.”

From Yale to Alice Springs – decades of justice exploration

This expansive view of justice did not emerge overnight. Daly’s intellectual journey has spanned continents, beginning in the United States at SUNY-Albany, Yale, and the University of Michigan.

Her path shifted profoundly in 1995, when she travelled to Australia as a Senior Fulbright Scholar to study restorative justice with John Braithwaite. What began as a short research stay became a permanent relocation.

Since joining Griffith University, Daly has become one of the most influential criminologists of her generation. She has written foundational work on gender, race, crime, and criminal justice; restorative justice; and conventional and innovative justice responses to sexual violence.

Her books, Gender, Crime, and Punishment and Redressing Institutional Abuse of Children, have influenced scholars, policymakers, and practitioners around the world; and 25 of her publications have been reprinted and eight have been translated.

Daly is leading a monumental project examining how 22 countries and self-governing territories respond to institutional abuse of children and associated historical/policy wrongs.

New paper is a must-read

From teaching at Yale to visiting jails in Alice Springs, GCI’s Kathleen Daly has spent a career examining justice from different angles.

Her new paper is a culmination of a lifetime of research and must-read for all criminologists, especially those entering the field.

“The award gave me permission to write this article which I wouldn’t have had otherwise,” she said.

“You want to be able to say something meaningful, and I’m looking forward to learning what people make of it.”

Ultimately, Daly finds, no one justice field of knowledge can accommodate all large-scale wrongs in diverse sociopolitical contexts, and she puts forward her idea of justice, which is keyed to research on victim–survivors’ claims for institutional justice.

As Daly writes, justice may be an “unachievable ideal”, but it remains a guiding horizon and a concept we should all think more deeply about.

For more, read ‘Justice: word, idea, practice’ here:https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9125.70009?af=R