10 Facts About Michael Tonry

Michael Tonry is the director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Crime and Public Policy.

Michael Tonry has been a visiting professor of law and criminology at the University of Lausanne since 2001 and a senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement at Free University Amsterdam since 2003.

In 1994, Tonry was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Michael Tonry was awarded an honorary doctorate from Free University Amsterdam in 2010.

Michael Tonry worked at the University of Chicago's Center for Studies in Criminal Justice from 1971 to 1973.

Michael Tonry has researched various subjects in the field of criminal law, including the increasing incarceration rate in the United States during the late 20th century.

Michael Tonry has been described as "a leading authority on crime policy" by the New York Times Adam Liptak.

However, in a 2008 article in Crime and Justice with Matthew Melewski, Michael Tonry found that a disproportionate number of racial minorities are incarcerated in part because sentencing policies have a disparate impact on those groups.

Michael Tonry wrote in The Handbook of Crime and Punishment, published in 2008, that the United States' prison sentences are far harsher than those of other countries "to which the United States would ordinarily be compared," and that English-speaking countries in general tend to be exceptionally punitive.

Michael Tonry has been president of both the American and European Societies of Criminology.