Submitted by J.W. Thulborn on Mon, 12/01/2026 - 15:56
It is with great sadness that I share the news that Professor Trevor Bennett, Emeritus Professor at the University of South Wales and a long-standing member of the Institute of Criminology, passed away on 29 December, age 79.
Trevor Bennett joined the Institute of Criminology in the early 1980s. He began his career in Cambridge as a Senior Research Associate, and subsequently held posts as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. He was the first Director of our MSt Policing programme when it was set up in 1996, and for the calendar year 1999 he was appointed Acting Director of the Institute after Professor Bottoms stood down from the Directorship. In 2000, he took up a professorship at the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales), where he went on to found the Centre for Criminology.
Trevor was an exceptionally productive and wide-ranging scholar whose work made lasting contributions to several core areas of criminological research. During his time in Cambridge, he played a major role in the development of evidence-based crime prevention, most notably through his influential work on burglary prevention with Mike Maguire, which remains a landmark in the field. He made important contributions to research on community policing and neighbourhood watch schemes, in collaboration with David Farrington, as well as to studies of public attitudes towards CCTV, with Loraine Gelsthorpe, and research on the fear of crime.
A further major strand of Trevor’s work focused on substance use and drug policy, including empirical research on the effects of heroin prescription on offending among people with drug dependence. In the late 1990s, he was the lead investigator, together with Katy Holloway, of the national NEW-ADAM research programme (New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring), which was designed to inform national policy on the relationship between drugs and crime.
Trevor was a generous colleague, an engaged teacher, and a rigorous and principled researcher. He will be deeply missed by colleagues at the Institute and across the wider criminological community.
Trevor’s funeral will take place on Friday 23 January at 1:15 pm at Huntingdon Crematorium.
Professor Manuel Eisner
Wolfson Professor of Criminology
Director, Institute of Criminology