Jack Katz

Jack Katz is an American sociologist and criminologist best known for his phenomenological approach to crime and deviance. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught sociology and criminology for several decades. Katz’s work stands out for its emphasis on the emotional, moral, and sensual dynamics of criminal behavior—an approach that has significantly influenced cultural criminology and the study of criminal motivations.

Katz’s groundbreaking book Seductions of Crime (1988) challenged conventional theories by focusing not on why people commit crimes in a rational or structural sense, but on how crime feels in the moment of action. He argued that many criminal acts are driven by emotional rewards such as excitement, power, or the resolution of moral tensions. This situational and experiential perspective placed Katz among the pioneers of what would later become cultural criminology. His work draws from symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and moral sociology, highlighting how criminals construct meaning and experience transcendence in the act of transgression. Katz’s ethnographic sensitivity and literary style have had a lasting impact on qualitative criminology.