Jacobs lived in Greenwich Village and had a keen interest in classical music, opera, ballet, and modern dance.
After completing military training (U.S. Army Reserves), he spent most of 1970 in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.
Under Janowitz’s guidance, Jacobs’ prison research grew into a dissertation (PhD 1975) and a book, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society,[3] now regarded as a classic in American penology.
During these years, Jacobs wrote Guard Unions and the Future of the Prisons (Institute of Public Employment, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1978), Individual Rights and Institutional Authority: Cases and Materials (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1979), and began work on New Perspectives on Prisons and Imprisonment (Cornell University Press, 1983).
Jacobs has co-taught seminars at NYU Law with David Garland, Ron Goldstock, Robert Stewart, Norval Morris, Jerome Cohen, Ronald K. Noble, Sharon Levin, Chester Mirsky, Joseph Viteritti, Anne Milgram, Judith Germano, Thomas Wiegand, John Gleeson, Eric Ruben, and Peter Kougasian.
Jacobs has also, over the years, undertaken research collaborations with dozens of students of the law school and fellows of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice, including co-authoring books with Frank Anechiarico, Kimberly Potter, Coleen Friel, Robert Raddick, Christopher Panarella, Jay Worthington, Kerry Cooperman, and Zoe Fuhr, as well as co-authoring scores of scholarly articles.
And he has maintained strong ties with criminologists and other scholars from around the world, including Cyrille Fijnaut (Netherlands), Elena Larrauri (Spain), Xiuimei Wang (China), Dirk van Zyl Smit (South Africa and UK), and Henner Hess (Germany).
Fifteen years later, when Fortunoff died, the distinguished criminal defense lawyer, Jack Hoffinger, became the colloquium's benefactor.
The Hoffinger Colloquium serves as a magnet for criminal justice professors, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from the metropolitan area and beyond.
In 1998, then dean (and later NYU president) John Sexton awarded Jacobs the Warren E. Burger Chair of Constitutional Law and the Courts.
He also took up a multi-year consulting position with the New York State Organized Crime Task Force (OCTF), whose director was Ronald Goldstock.
He has also written well over one hundred articles on diverse criminal law and criminology topics, most recently on the jurisprudential and policy issues related to gun control.