Sociology Professor Wins Yale's Sussman Award

By Joe Peters

With a phrase like "Going to hell in a cradle" in its title, James Willis's Ph.D. dissertation perhaps was bound to be noticed. However, it has accomplished more than mere head turning, earning the sociology professor the Marvin B. Sussman Award for the best dissertation the Yale Sociology Department received in the past two years.

"It makes you feel like all those hours in the library were worth something," says Willis. The subject matter of his work is Britain's policy of transporting prisoners to the United States and Australia during the 18th and 19th centuries. "In short, it'ss looking at how punishments change over time," he says.

After submitting his dissertation in 2000, Willis came to UMass Boston and found he had to make his own adjustment to a student body that in some regards is much more challenging than those of Yale or Wellesley, where he had lectured.

"The students here are much more worldly," he says, explaining that UMass Boston students bring their own life experiences into class discussions whereas students at other schools rely on more abstract or coached answers.

Currently, Willis's work outside the classroom involves evaluating COMPSTAT, a method of measuring crime and the effectiveness of police. He spent a great deal of time interviewing police in Lowell as part of a report he has coauthored.

Willis can trace his dissertation interest to a sentence he read in graduate school. It simply referred to the fact that British prisoners were transported to other countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. A British immigrant himself, Willis decided to delve into this phenomenon. He admits never finding that one moment of epiphany that researchers dream of. "It much more became an exercise of blood, sweat, and tears," he says.

"I think one of the things about this is that it was a very different kind of project," he says of why his dissertation may have risen above others submitted. "When people talk about theories of punishment, they usually don't address transportation," he adds, explaining that transportation of prisoners was a sort of "social oddity" that often is overlooked. Apparently it was not a very pleasant oddity either; "Going to hell in a cradle" is how one 18th century prisoner described the trip to America.

Willis plans to return to his dissertation subject matter for a journal article he hopes to submit this summer, and recently he did return to Yale for talk on his dissertation and to accept the Sussman Award.
While his dissertation research and his current work may be centuries apart, he does see broad connections between the two in terms of how society views the meaning of punishment.

"I feel as though I am in these two different worlds," he says. "One is very current and applied, and the other is very historical."

Image: James Willis, assistant professor of sociology, received top honors from Yale University for his research on how society views punishment. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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