Anthony Platt


Anthony Michael Platt is an English-born sociologist and criminologist. He is a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. He is Professor Emeritus at Sacramento State School of Social Work. Platt is a notable scholar in the domains of child welfare and deviance.

Early life and education

Platt was born in Manchester, England in 1942. He then attended the University of Oxford and acquired a degree in law and jurisprudence. He received his masters and PhD in criminology in 1965 and 1996 respectively from University of California, Berkeley. Platt completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the University of Chicago. Then he returned to the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 as an Assistant Professor. He then became a part of the radical criminology movement in criminal justice studies.

Selected books

  • Platt, Tony. The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley. Heyday Books, 2023.
  • Platt Tony. Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California’s Buried Indigenous Past. Berkeley, California, Heyday, 2021.
  • Platt, Tony. Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
  • Platt, Tony, and Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary. Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial. London, Routledge, 2016.
  • Platt, Tony. Grave Matters : Excavating California’s Buried Past. Heyday, 2011.
  • Platt, Anthony M. E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. Rutgers University Press, 1991.
  • Platt, Anthony M. The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917-1970. Collier Books, 1971.
  • Platt, Anthony M, and Miroslava Chavez-Garcia. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2009, originally published in 1969.