Since October 2024 he has served as Chief Executive Officer of Benchmark Cambridge, a global police reform organisation.

Sherman's use of randomized controlled experiments to study deterrence and crime prevention has led him to examine such wide-ranging issues as domestic violence, saturation patrol, gun violence, drug-dealing houses, and police-led restorative justice with reintegrative shaming.

He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world; he has also been credited as a key founder of the field of experimental criminology.

Sherman's career began at age 20 in the New York City Mayor's Office and Police Department as a New York City Urban Fellow and a program research analyst to office of NYPD's reforming Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, where he began a long research partnership with NYPD Assistant Chief Tony Bouza.

Sherman's early experimental research into the influence of arrest on recidivism in spouse abuse led to changes in police department policies and procedures nationwide, encouraged state legislatures to modify state statutes to allow for misdemeanor arrest, and eventually resulted in five federally funded replications, one of which Sherman led in Milwaukee.

Since 1995, Sherman has been co directing (with Heather Strang) a program of prospective longitudinal experiments in restorative justice involving approximately 2,500 offenders and 2,000 crime victims.

From 1999 to 2007, Sherman was Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, initially in the Department of Sociology.

Sherman also served Maryland as chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice from 1995 to 1999, and as a faculty member from 1982 to 1999.

The most visible of these new institutions is the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, which philanthropist Jerry Lee and Sherman proposed to Professor Jerzy Sarnecki of Stockholm University in mid-2000, and which Sarnecki brought to the Swedish Ministry of Justice where it received support from successive Ministers.

The Prize has been awarded annually since then, most often presented by a member of the Royal Family, with Sherman and Sarnecki as co-chairs of the International Jury that selects the winners.

In 2012, Justice Minister Beatrice Ask concluded an agreement with the Soderberg foundations to provide joint funding with Ministry investment of a permanent endowment for a new Stockholm Prize Foundation, which guarantees annual funding of the Prize in perpetuity.

In 1999, he received the Society's Edwin Sutherland Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Criminology and in 2020 the August Vollmer Award for outstanding contributions to criminal justice, in honor of the reforming police chief of Berkeley and Los Angeles who founded the ASC in 1941.

His father, YMCA Secretary Donald L. Sherman, and Mother, American Baptist Minister Margaret H. Sherman, campaigned for world peace and served as Non-Governmental Observers at the United Nations for the YMCA and American Baptist Convention, respectively [2].