Hans Toch
1930-2021
Michelle and Jay invite all to a celebration of life July 11 4:00-7:00 PM. Come raise a glass, share a memory, and celebrate his full life at The Point (1100 Madison Ave, Albany NY 12208), Streaming online beginning at 5pm EST. If you would like to say a few words but can not attend please contact michelle@overit.com. We will stream you into the celebration.
For the dogs: nycsecondchancerescue.org
For the humans: justgiving.com/prisonreformtrust
Hans Toch, a towering figure in the academic discipline of criminology and criminal justice, died June 18 at his home in Albany, New York. Born April 17, 1930 in Vienna, Austria, Toch escaped the ravages of the holocaust, emigrating initially to Cuba and then to the United States. He earned his B.A. at Brooklyn College in 1952 and his Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton in 1955. He served in the U.S. Navy, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, a visiting Lecturer at Harvard, and a member of the psychology department at Michigan State University before being recruited in 1967 as a founding faculty member of the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany, the first program in the country to confer the Ph.D. degree in criminal justice.
Toch remained on the faculty at the University at Albany until his retirement in 2008, attaining the rank of Distinguished Professor and mentoring countless students and junior faculty members over the course of his lengthy tenure. Toch’s scholarship reflected a consistent humanistic bent and a concern for representing the viewpoints, understandings, and humanity of the subjects of his writings: offenders, police officers, the incarcerated, and correctional officers. He authored more than 30 books including such classics as Violent Men: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Violence; Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival; and Stress in Policing.
He received the August Vollmer Award from the American Society of Criminology in 2001, and in 2005 he was recognized with the Prix DeGreff award for distinction in clinical criminology by the International Society of Criminology. He was a fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Psychological Association, and in 1996 served as president of the American Association for Forensic Psychology.
Throughout his academic career Toch touched legions of friends, colleagues, and students, who remember him for his unique combination of commanding intellect, compassionate humanitarianism, and unflagging good humor. Among their memories are his doting fondness for his pet dogs, his booming laugh and, until forced to relinquish them, his ever-present cigars and their malodorous fumes. His opinions, frequently fueled by righteous indignation about perceived injustices, were unfiltered and issued loudly, without apology and with supreme self-confidence. As an obsessional and expert collector of antiques and art, Toch enjoyed nothing more than death-defying drives (automotive skills were not among his strengths) to remote, country antique stores to browse for Shaker furniture or porcelain dogs and good-naturedly haggle with the owner over “extortionate” prices. He cultivated the image of a curmudgeonly grouch, but all who came to know him soon discovered the heart of gold that lurked beneath the ostensibly gruff exterior. For his many friends and colleagues, Hans is fondly remembered for his brilliant intellect, his ineffable buoyancy, quick wit, eloquent prose, and his unfailing commitment and enduring contributions to rigorous social scientific scholarship and social justice.
Craig Haney, Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz, observed that Toch “literally invented the field” for which he is best known—the psychology of imprisonment. “No psychologist had ever written so insightfully about how being confined in prison profoundly affected a person and no psychologist had ever addressed these issues with so much sensitivity and humanity. Hans was a true mentor to me and countless others, someone who was incredibly generous with his time, and who unselfishly shared his biting wit and unmatched wisdom (usually in equal measure). Hans leaves a wonderful legacy of knowledge behind, yet his passing is a truly immeasurable loss.”
Michael Gottfredson, Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Irvine, described Toch as “the rare scholar who has truly made foundational contributions to multiple fields of thought: from Violent Men and Stress in Policing to his work on prisons. Countless individuals have been influenced by his masterful work, by witnessing his enviable principles in action, and by learning from his model of courtesy, politeness and respectful scholarly interaction.”
Terence Thornberry, University at Albany Distinguished Professor Emeritus, described Toch as “one of the most generous and helpful colleagues I have ever known. He had a gruff, growly exterior that struck fear into the hearts of students, colleagues, and newly minted Dean’s alike. But underneath that exterior was one of the world’s great softies. Hans had a heart of gold and I never knew anyone who came to him for help that did not receive it. He was a man of opinion, and didn’t care who heard or knew about his opinions. And he had that marvelous belly laugh that seemed to shake the entire second floor of the building. Late afternoon conversations with Hans were a joy to behold. Hans was truly one-of-a-kind.”
Jamie Fellner, former Senior Advisor, U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch, remarked, “Hans was a remarkable man whose wisdom, abiding humanism, kindness, courtesy and generous spirit touched many. I am fortunate I was one of them. He had an old-world charm. He was a true gentleman as well as a scholar, generous to friends and colleagues, a person whose humanism was not confined to the written word, but inspired his life-long work to improve jails and prisons.”
James Acker, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany said that Toch’s “exquisite style and commanding substance were the hallmarks of his mountain of scholarship over the years, representing scores of timeless volumes and penetrating articles dealing with criminology, policing, and the pains of imprisonment. But his writings can hardly capture Hans’s sum and substance. Hans Toch was a man of conscience and good will, of abiding conviction, a man who deeply touched many in many, many ways. He has left a host of treasured reminders of his wisdom and his principled way of being. We will miss him greatly.”
Shadd Maruna, Professor at Queen’s University Belfast, called Toch “a rarest of beasts, a true original, unlike almost any other in the field. He contributed ground-breaking ideas across a range of subjects from the study of violence, to community policing, to the experience of imprisonment. A common thread across all of this work is a belief in involving staff and clients in participatory, democratic efforts at bottom-up change. He pioneered participatory research methods involving prisoners and police officers as both researchers and research subjects, and brought a humanistic voice to the authoritarian world of criminal justice. His work was transformative in the Scottish Prison Service, among other far-flung places, and he adopted Scotland as a second home, largely celebrated through consumption of single malt scotch.”
Toch is survived by his son Jay Toch, his daughter Michelle Toch Dinsmore, his son-in-law Daniel Dinsmore, and his grandchildren Braydon Hans Louis Dinsmore and Sierra Ann Dinsmore.
I had the privilege of getting to know Professor Hans Toch when I served as Coordinator of Admissions at the University at Albany’s Graduate School of Criminal Justice from the mid-1970’s to 1984. I don’t remember a time when he was not on the three-person Admissions Committee which decided whether or not a student would be accepted into this prestigious school. As a result, I had contact with him often, and he was always very kind to me. As soon as I saw his photo today, I immediately recalled his laughter and could still hear it as plainly as if I had heard it just yesterday. It came from his inner-most being and was contagious. I also had the awesome opportunity of going to his house once with a student he was mentoring and got to see more of his unique personality in the possessions which surrounded him at his home. If Hans Toch touched your life in any way, you were indeed blessed. My condolences to his family.
Back in the Stone Age (1980s), I was a student of Professor Toch, and he served on my dissertation committee. He was truly a humanistic man–brilliant, compassionate, funny, forthright, kind. He cared about prisoners, police, correction officers, and victims, and he made significant contributions to both psychology and criminal justice through his writings and advocacy. His influence on me–and I am sure on countless other students across the years–has never waned.
Hans Toch has been on the top of my short-list of scholar heroes for decades. It’s sad to accept that I won’t be reading another of his thoughtful, beautifully written articles, chapters or books … but what a hell of a scholarly legacy he has left us. I was lost as a young, naïve psychologist in the early 70s working in a maximum-security prison in Canada … felt confused … didn’t at all understand what was going on around me in this strange environment. Coming across some of Hans’s work … most significantly Violent Men and Living in Prison … widened my eyes and nourished my mind! I was stuck with working to humanize corrections for the rest of my career. Hans was my external advisor for my PHD thesis. He gave me a hard time with his usual penetrating questioning of my interpretations and understandings. We became friends and stayed in touch for many years. I will always fondly remember his continued penetrating questioning of my ideas as we drank single malt scotch together quite often in Scotland, late into the night. There was nothing Hans enjoyed more than a good debate!! We joined in critiquing the ‘psychopathy’ mob at a wonderful week long gathering of experts at the Il Ciocco resort in the Tuscany. We took side trips to Lucca and Florence and Hans enthralled me with stories of his incredible childhood. I visited with him at his museum-like home in Albany several times … more scotch, more penetrating questioning, and a delightful education in antique collecting. Hans was never even slightly boring to be with. His mind was incredibly sharp and his personality was vibrant, uninhibited, direct and totally honest. He inspired me and gave me determination, hope and purpose for my own career. He will be with me until my own time comes to fly with the angels. RIP my dear friend. You gave us more than could be expected from any human being.
A noble soul sent to soil: fresh thorn on a dry pale stem.
Sixty years ago I was an undergraduate student in Hans Toch’s classes at Michigan State University. I liked his regular two courses so much that I next enrolled with a friend in his personalized special studies research class. Our student contributions included interviews with Malcolm X and an explorative diagnosis of the Socialist Labor Party. Over the next decades, his own contributions revolutionized the field. A decade later I published a debate with Bernard Diamond and others on the Insanity Defense, a book completely inspired by Hans. By then we were longtime friends and colleagues. Turned out that we had ancestors from the same parts of Eastern Europe, so much that eventually Hans declared that we were likely related and I was his “Homie”. His reviews of my work that followed stood out by their clarity, brevity, and insightful humor. My favorite was the close of his cover quote for my “Iatrogenics Handbook” on the doctor’s mistakes: “If the shoe fits it will hurt”. He eventually said he experienced his own share of iatrogenic medical mistakes, declaring that he was at the end of his road and his home was his hospice. We spent eight years still emailing shared ideas, until I began to doubt his demise was likely after all, at least not in this century. But he was bound to be right eventually. And now, as usual, he was. Glad he waited at least as long as he did. What a dear friend, gift, genius, and guide he was to me in this chaotic world. What a fine mind and unforgettable sense of humor. He certainly loved his wife, children, and friends. It is returned.
Hans was a Giant. He invented an entire field of study — qualitative method for uncovering the experiences of the keepers and the kept and how they run carceral institutions. Since, as he taught us, people in prison are mostly ignored by the rest of society and the resulting secrecy is the prerequisite for abuses visited upon them, his researching and reporting the experience of prisoners broke new ground and served to cut down on the abuse. I remember being horrified to learn from his early books of the human rights abuses and the pain and trauma of prisoners, his books were one big motivator for me to take up prison human rights work. He was a superlative scholar and humanist. I will miss him, even though our contact was infrequent. I always knew he supported my work and the work of colleagues of my generation, and considered it a continuation of his own. I had the distinct honor of writing one article with him, “Violence in Prisons, Re-visited.” That article is getting wide recognition, as are all of the books and articles Hans wrote, reporting on his very innovative research He was very funny, in a Jewish way but without the guilt. His humor made more tolerable the dark places we get into studying prison realities. And he was old-school when it came to tech. I wrote him to ask for a blurb for my then new book, Prison Madness, he said he’d be happy to, I said give me your email address and I’ll send details, and he said ‘I don’t have a computer.’ That was 1998. And he wrote a great blurb. He was an original, an inspiration, and a joy to know.
Hans Toch was the most generous scholar I met in 40 years in academia. He was a mentor and role model for hundreds of today’s most important criminologists. He had a wonderful sense of humor and enjoyed a good laugh. It was an honor to work with him.
Tick-Toch, Tick-Toch, Tick-Toch.
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo ….
In the cosmic midnight hour,
I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together.
Goo goo g’joob.
Hyperion’s progeny.
Laureate sage, humanist physician to all men.
Leander’s muse.
Love always makes those eloquent that have it.
St. Leonard’s stand-in.
Liberating those left in darkness and chained in irons.
For his conversations, compositions, customs, conversations, and laughter,
digna factis recipiet.
Hi
Dear all – I wrote the following memories of Hans to his daughter Michelle some weeks ago, and wanted to share them here also. Have enjoyed so much reading all the other recollections. Thank you each, and thank you Hans.
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I was a student at SUNY in 2007 when a battle arose over the question of whether students should be permitted to vote in faculty meetings. SUNY’s criminal justice school, we would learn, was one of the only places in the country where this practice was permitted. We voted on everything – including which faculty were hired, promoted and tenured. For some this was clearly discomfiting, and a campaign was launched to end this practice by modifications to the school’s bylaws. For us students, it was a momentous and existential issue.
Hans was resolute in his support for student participation in decision-making. I remember clearly him putting colleagues on the defensive, asking ‘why do you think there should be less democracy?’. He lost patience entirely with one in particular, to whose extended oration he responded, ‘with that and a quarter, you can ride the bus.’ As a student advocate in the debate, I tried carefully to measure my tone – Hans was freer with words, and yet he spoke for us.
We won the fight, with three-quarters of the faculty voting to maintain student participation. Hans led his colleagues by example throughout.
I was re-reading his book Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment over the holidays, entirely by coincidence. It really is just lovely, and it preserves and reproduces documents and events from his life which I suppose risked being lost to history. I read it now as a guide on “how to be” – though I’m not sure he intended it to be used that way. Among other things, he repeats something I heard him say in person once – that while some students found him intimidating, he was really a ‘pussycat.’ I’m grateful to say he never seemed to me anything other than a pussycat. He was still impossible to talk to, of course, because he was deaf as a post. But I was shameless enough to yell in his face, and he was patient, so really, it worked out. I am not one for regrets – but spending too little time engaged in that yelling is certainly one of them.
It was shortly after that fight about voting that I asked Hans to sit on my dissertation committee. At my defense many years later, he would comment that he suspected he was only there because I forgot to remove him. Of course he wasn’t – and he quickly proved how wise I had been to keep him on. His thoroughness as a reader was immediately clear when his first question began ‘I’d like to take issue with the last sentence you wrote.’ His fellow committee members, like high school students who hadn’t done the homework, discreetly checked their copies to find out what I’d written.
I suppose it was at this point that I discovered how much pussycats enjoy games of cat and mouse. In short order, he produced a table of statistics which contradicted my central argument. He batted me around a bit with questions before letting his foot off my tail. I felt I had the honor of standing in the ring with a prize-fighter for a moment, and walking away merely scathed. But it was only after the defense that his graciousness was fully revealed, when he passed to me a copy of an article he had written on the theme of my thesis, and yet which I had neglected to cite.
Years later than that, my wife and I visited his house, full as it was with antiques and a disruptive dog. We had a lovely time that day, and I left with a clutch of John Mortimer books on the trials and tribulations of an Oxford barrister. Hans thought I might have a special personal connection to them, and I did, having met the now-late Mortimer once at a talk he gave about penal reform. In that moment, I realized and appreciated how close Hans was to the center of things, and how extraordinary it was to be so close to him.
Hans has given me a touch-stone on how to be. The mixture of conviction and thoroughness, the intolerance for laziness, the seriousness and the levity. I hope to make him proud in some small way, and whether I do or not, I remain deeply grateful for the gift of his presence.
Thank you, Andy. Really nice post. One of us from years ago appreciates it. I’m sure many others do as well. Giving students a vote….good for him.
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