Professor of criminology and criminal justice at the LSE who campaigned against capital punishment and life imprisonment
Although Terence Morris's academic career as professor of criminology and criminal justice at the London School of Economics was outstanding, his achievements in the world of penal affairs never quite matched his talent for innovative thinking and felicitous expression of views about the changeless state of penology in officialdom. Morris, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 82, was an active interpreter of the phenomenon of crime and the machinery of criminal justice, especially the issues of punishment that call for data, analysis and human understanding. Instinctive punitiveness was, for him, inadvisable.
In 1962, with his first wife, Pauline, he co-authored the first sociological study of an English prison, Pentonville. That institution was built in 1842; it was "a prison in which reformist, punitive and apathetic attitudes are quite fantastically confused," they concluded. The Morrises' work was not an indictment of the prison system, antiquated and outmoded as it might have been, with its slopping out and smell of excrement. It was an attempt to show, however, that in the maximum security society, all are prisoners – inmates and officers alike. Pentonville was an example of the prison building exhibiting the aims of penological policies – punishment, retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation – which all vied confusedly with each other.
It is a statement that could be written today; only the ingredients of the confusion have shifted since the 1960s, towards less violent and disturbed institutions. In 1987, Douglas Hurd, then home secretary, said: "The days are gone when a home secretary could talk confidently on the basis of a single philosophical approach to imprisonment and its purposes ... Experience shows that there are few certainties which can guide our thinking. Imprisonment … meets a variety of ends … the mixture changing according to the type of crime and the individual offender involved." All this was systematically portrayed in Pentonville, which greatly influenced opinion among budding criminologists and penal administrators.
Morris himself declared recently that "we have largely gone backwards, and at best stood still. The blame cannot be laid at the door of the prison service, or indeed the judges. The address for delivery [of blame] is London SW1 [the home of the Ministry of Justice, successor to the Home Office]." Ministers have listened but given no heed to the independent advice of Morris and his colleagues.
Son of Albert and Norah Morris, Terence was born in Croydon, Surrey, and educated at the John Ruskin grammar school there. At the LSE, he was one of the brightest of Hermann Mannheim's pupils; Mannheim was one of the three progenitors of postwar British criminology, together with Sir Leon Radzinowicz and Dr Max Grünhut. Morris joined the staff of LSE as lecturer in sociology in 1955, becoming reader in 1963 and professor in 1969.
Generations of students had cause to be grateful, and many of them were inspired to participate in penal affairs, some becoming successful probation officers who propagated the continuing idea of treatment of offenders in the community as an alternative to imprisonment. Morris's relations with colleagues at the LSE were not always smooth; the place was full of prima donnas. A major academic issue was whether criminology, traditionally taught by social scientists, should remain in the department of social administration, or should be housed in the quite separate department of law. Ultimately, it was decided to leave well alone. In the year after his retirement in 1994, Morris taught a course exclusively for lawyers which he confessed "was the best time of my entire career at the LSE".
His activities in penal reform – he learned and taught that not all penal reform is progressive – were heavily punctuated by his contribution to the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in 1965 and his persistent advocacy, so far unavailing, of persuading successive administrations to be rid of the alternative, mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. His voice was heard in a series of articles in the Observer in the 1960s and led to the publication Fine Lines and Distinctions (2011), in which he and I argued for the reform of the law and penalty for murder. He became in 2004 a founding member of the Homicide Review Advisory Group (HomRAG), at first under the chairmanship of the dean of Southwark Cathedral, Colin Slee, which continues to report on the messy state of the law of homicide.
Morris's early involvement in the abolition campaign grew out of a relationship with Gerald Gardiner (the lord chancellor in the Harold Wilson administration that came to power in 1964), who had been the Labour candidate in Croydon, where Morris had grown up. He had been an active member of the local Labour party, from which he resigned in 1972, although he remained a Labour supporter.
From 1966 until 1994, Morris served as a lay magistrate in inner London – at two courts in Tower Bridge and Camberwell. In the adult court he brought a refreshing outlook to the problems of delinquency. When he transferred to the young offenders' court he found his fellow members unsympathetic to his reforming zeal. For him, the system had a great chance of reform while crime remained a youthful activity.
Throughout his life, Morris displayed a keen interest in sailing and anything mechanical; he was a keen cyclist until his recent illness. When he first contracted a form of motor neurone disease, which began to affect his ability to communicate orally, he abandoned his academic writings and pursued rural pursuits – cycling and gardening. But the illness eventually spurred him into writing his memoirs, which he shared with his close friends.
He is survived by his second wife, Penelope, whom he married in 1973; and by a daughter, Catherine, and stepdaughter, Carel, from his marriage to Pauline, which ended in divorce.
• Terence Patrick Michael Morris, criminologist, born 7 June 1931; died 8 July 2013