Chair,
Department of Criminal Justice

A professor of criminal justice and Research Fellow with the Center for Public Policy, Dr. Taylor’s expertise is in environmental psychology, sociological ecology, human territorial function, environmental justice, and environmental crimes. A Temple University faculty member since 1984, he teaches, Introduction to Criminal Justice, Introduction to Research Methods, Introduction to Statistics, Victims of Crime, Communities and Crime Prevention, Environmental Criminology, and graduate courses in Environmental Justice and Communities and Crime Prevention. Dr. Taylor has recently been involved in researching sprawl and its impacts. Dr. Taylor has written numerous articles on the topics of criminology, psychology, and issues of the environment. His books include Breaking Away From Broken Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the Nationwide Fight Against Crime, Grime, Fear and Decline and Human Territorial Functioning: An Empirical Evolutionary Perspective on Individual and Small Group Territorial Cognitions, Behaviors, and Consequences. Recently published articles include “Responses to prison for environmental criminals: Impacts of incident, perpetrator and respondent characteristics” in Environment and Behavior, written with Dr. Robert J. Mason, Director of the Temple University Environmental Studies program. Dr. Taylor also contributed chapters to the Handbook on Environmental Psychology in 2002 and Crime: Public Policies and Crime Control and Does It Take a Village?: Community Effects on Children, Adolescents, and Families in 2001. His research over the years has been funded by various organizations, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Corrections, and the Department of the Interior. He was the spring 2000 recipient of the College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award. In 1999, he was awarded a visiting fellowship from the National Institute of Justice. Dr. Taylor is an associated faculty member of the Center for Sustainable Communities at Temple University Ambler. He is a member of the American Sociological Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.