Anthony Bottoms

Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA (born 29 August 1939) is a British criminologist.

Subsequently, he became a lecturer in Sheffield (1968), becoming a professor there in 1976.

He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.

Bottoms was educated at Eltham College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA), followed by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Dip. Criminol.), and a PhD at Sheffield University.

He worked as a probation officer before entering academic life as a researcher at Cambridge.

At Cambridge, he worked at the new Institute of Criminology under the guidance of Leon Radzinowicz.

Among his contributions, he coined the term 'populist punitiveness' in 1995, subsequently more widely referred to as penal populism, a hypothesis that became influential within the sociology of punishment.

He was knighted in 2001 for services to the criminal justice system, an Honorary Doctor of Laws at the University of Edinburgh in 2015, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

Bottoms' influence within British and global criminology and upon criminal justice practice has been considerable.

He has published and contributed towards a large number of highly influential journal articles, official reports, book chapters, and books on topics including environmental criminology, probation, the sociology of punishment, community penalties, desistance research, policing, and prisons.