Solomon Kobrin; Fought Juvenile Delinquency

Solomon Kobrin, 85, an educator who was a pioneer in combating juvenile delinquency. The Chicago native attended the universities of Wisconsin and Chicago and earned his doctorate at USC, where he taught until his retirement in 1975. He was a past president of the Illinois Academy of Criminology and the Assn. for Criminal Justice Research, and had been a consultant to the President’s Committee on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, and to the U.S. Children’s Bureau Conference on Delinquency Research. In 1940, he and two colleagues at the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago conducted the Chicago Area Project, an innovative effort to mobilize community residents to provide recreation and other constructive outlets for inner-city youths. He was recognized for that work and for his studies of street gangs and drug addiction in 1977 when the American Society of Criminology awarded him its Edwin H. Sutherland Award. On Jan. 15 in Laguna Hills of heart disease.