[1] Born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1955, he attended Rosebank Primary School and Harris Academy[citation needed].
[2] From 1979 until 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh's Department of Criminology, where he was first a Lecturer, then a Reader, and finally the holder of a Personal Chair in Penology[citation needed].
He was a Shelby Cullom Davis Fellow in Princeton University's history department, the 2012/2013 Douglas McK.
Since 1997, he has been a member of the New York University School of Law faculty, where he holds the Arthur T. Vanderbilt professorship, and is also a full professor in the Department of Sociology.
In fall 2014, he was the Shimizu Visiting Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and in spring 2018 a Paris Fellow in NYU's Global Research Initiative program.