Prof Duncan Chappell, one of Australia’s most recognised and respected criminologists, died in Sydney on 18 August 2026, aged 87, leaving his second wife, Rhonda, and children Kirstin and Hamish. Duncan masterfully bridged the gap between the disciplines of law, social science and politics and actively promoted the importance of academic research in addressing crime and justice questions in the public sector. Best known as the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology from 1987 to 1994, he leaves a substantial legacy of scholarship and progress in criminology both in Australia and internationally, and contributed to the debate on some of the most important criminological problems facing society over the last half-century.
Duncan was born in England on 1 August 1939 but lived most of his life in Australia after his family migrated to Tasmania in 1947. He graduated in arts and law with first-class honours from the University of Tasmania in 1962, the year he married his first wife, Susan. He attributed his interest in criminology to having heard an address by Sir John “Jack” Barry (Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, with a keen interest in criminology) when he was a law student in Hobart. He decided to travel to England and completed a PhD at Cambridge University in 1965 under the supervision of Professor Sir Leon Radzinowicz. Thereafter he took up a Senior Lectureship in Law at the University of Sydney in December 1965. This was around the time the University of Sydney’s Institute of Criminology was established. Duncan was also a foundation member of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology in 1967, was Assistant Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology from 1968 to 1971, and in 2016, he received the Society’s Distinguished Criminologist Award at its annual ANZSOC conference in Hobart.
In 1969, he left Sydney on a Harkness Fellowship at the School of Criminal Justice in the State University of New York, Albany, becoming an Associate Professor in 1971, after which he was appointed Director of the Law and Justice Study Center at Battelle Memorial Institute in Seattle in 1973. He then returned to Australia accepting a Visiting Professorship in Legal Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He received a position with the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) in Sydney in 1978. During his tenure at the ALRC, Duncan was appointed as Commissioner in Charge of the substantial Inquiry into Sentencing of Federal Offenders released in 1980.
His next move was to Canada in 1980 where he was appointed Professor, and later Director, of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. In July 1987 he returned to Australia as the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology while retaining his status as Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser until 1991. Duncan was eminently qualified for the role of Director of the Institute, given that he had both academic achievements (including a rapidly growing output as editor and joint editor of textbooks on crime and criminal justice), as well as extensive experience advising public sector bodies on criminal justice administration and law reform.
Some of his key contributions included his work with the International Labour Organisation in Geneva that examined the exposure of workplaces to violence through criminal events. Later in his career he brought his expertise to the NSW Mental Health Review Tribunal. From October 1992 to June 1993 Duncan lived in South Africa as a Member, then Chair, of the Commonwealth Secretariat Observer Mission to South Africa for the United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping mission in the lead up to the post-apartheid elections. During this mission he visited the notorious prison on Robben Island as well as Pretoria prison where, at the time, there were several hundred prisoners on death row.
Duncan remained at the Australian Institute of Criminology for almost seven years. At the Institute, he presided over some major initiatives including, most famously, the move to the new circular ‘criminology’ building in Canberra city. Following a number of mass firearms killings in Australia in 1987, Duncan sought and won the appointment of the AIC as the Secretariat to the National Committee on Violence that resulted in the publication of a major monograph, Violence: Directions for Australia in 1990, managed by Peter Grabosky as Director of Research.
Duncan was also keenly involved in enhancing Australia’s policy role internationally by seeking the affiliation of the Institute with the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme Network. In recognition of this, the UN flag was proudly displayed on the AIC’s new building at its opening on 25 July 1990. However, towards the end of his time as AIC Director, he fell out of favour with Minister for Justice, Duncan Kerr, partly due to the Institute’s continuing annual deficits that were creating difficulties for a government attempting to reduce the costs of the public service in Canberra.
A friend and mentor to many, Duncan retained his interest in crime and justice issues long into his retirement, regularly attending ANZSOC conferences and events and keeping up to date with important criminological policy debates. In recent times, he specialised in art crime, editing The Palgrave Handbook on Art Crime in 2019 (with Saskia Hufnagel), and teaching a post-graduate course on this subject each year in Amelia, Italy.
During the 50th anniversary celebrations of ANZSOC in 2017, Duncan (who was one of only four who were present in 1967 when the Society was formed – none of whom now remains alive), observed at the celebratory luncheon: “I don’t anticipate being here to celebrate the 100th anniversary but I am sure that many of you who are around this table will be there and I wish both them and the society very well, and good progress for the next 50 years”. Vale Duncan Chappell.
Sources:
Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC). 2017. Distinguished Criminologist Award 2016: Professor Duncan Chappell. PacifiCrim 14 (1): 8. https://anzsoc.org/files/pacificrim/PacifiCrim-14-Nov-2017.pdf.
Biles, David and Chappell, Duncan. 1995. AIC: The International Role of the Australian Institute of Criminology, in Bassiouni, M. Cherif (ed.), The Contributions of Specialized Institutes and Non-Governmental Organizations to the United Nations Criminal Justice Program, 233–238, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Chappell, Duncan. 2021. Some Reflections on the 50th Birthday of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. In The Changing Face of Criminology in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Russell G. Smith, xiii–xvii. London: Sage.
Chappell, Duncan. 2016. Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the Australian Crime Commission Amendment (Criminology Research) Bill 2016, No 16, 27 October 2016, Canberra: Department of the Senate.
Chappell, Duncan. 1983. Australia. In International Handbook of Contemporary Developments in Criminology: Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, ed. Elmer Johnson. London: Greenwood Press.
Hufnagel, Saskia and Chappell, Duncan (eds.). 2019. The Palgrave Handbook on Art Crime, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Russell G. 2023. Public Sector Criminological Research: The Australian Institute of Criminology, 1972-2022, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-28356-7
