Henry N. Pontell is Presidential Scholar, Professor, and Chair of the Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Before joining the faculty in January 2015, he was a professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he remains a Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of criminology, law & society in the School of Social Ecology and of sociology in the School of Social Sciences. At UCI he served as Chair of the Department of Criminology, Law & Society, Director of Graduate Studies in Social Ecology, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies for the campus, and Faculty Assistant to the Vice Chancellor for Research.

He has also held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, the University of Virginia, the University of Melbourne, the University of Macau, Macau University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.

His books include International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (Springer), Social Deviance: Readings in Theory and Research (McGraw Hill), Profit Without Honor: White-Collar Crime and the Looting of America (Pearson, Prentice-Hall), Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis (University of California Press), A Capacity to Punish: The Ecology of Crime and Punishment (Indiana University Press), Contemporary Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honor of Gilbert Geis (Pearson, Prentice Hall), and Prescription for Profit: How Doctors Defraud Medicaid (University of California Press).

Dr. Pontell has served as Vice-President of the American Society of Criminology and President of the Western Society of Criminology, and is an elected Fellow of both organizations. He is currently President of the White Collar Crime Research Consortium of the National White Collar Crime Center