John Ortiz Smykla, PhD, is retired director and professor of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. He also held appointments at the University of Alabama, where he served as professor and chair of the Department of Criminal Justice; the University of South Alabama, where he served as professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice; and the University of West Florida,where he served as professor and chair of the Department of Criminal Justice and Legal Studies and was named Distinguished University Professor. He earned the interdisciplinary social science PhD in criminal justice, sociology, and anthropology from Michigan State University. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from California State University at Northridge.
Dr. Smykla has authored or edited five corrections books, including Probation, Parole, and Community Based Corrections (2013) and Offender Reentry: Rethinking Criminology and Criminal Justice (2014). His coauthored data set Executions in the United States, 1608–2003: The Espy File, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is one of the most frequently requested criminal justice data files from the University of Michigan’s Inter- University Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Dr. Smykla has published more than 75 research articles on corrections and policing issues. He recently completed a multiyear analysis of federal reentry court and the impact of police body cameras.
In 1986, Dr. Smykla was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and Uruguay. He is a member of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the Southern Criminal Justice Association.In 1996, the Southern Criminal Justice Association named him Educator of the Year. In 1997, he served as program chair for the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2000, he served as president of the Southern Criminal Justice Association. In 2017, Dr. Smykla and his colleagues received Springer’s Outstanding American Journal of Criminal Justice Article Award for their research on police body cameras, and in the same year, another of their articles on police body cameras was named Most Read in Criminal Justice and Behavior. He was inducted into the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice Wall of Fame in 2019.
