Hans died June 18, 2021, in Albany, N.Y.
Born April 17, 1930, in Vienna, Austria, Hans escaped the Holocaust, immigrating initially to Cuba and then to the United States. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College in 1952 and a Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton in 1955.
Hans served in the Navy, was a Fulbright fellow in Norway, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and a member of the psychology department at Michigan State University before being recruited in 1967 as a founding faculty member of the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York at Albany, the first program in the country to confer a Ph.D. in criminal justice. He retired from SUNY Albany in 2008.
Hans’ scholarship represented the viewpoints, understandings, and humanity of offenders, police officers, the incarcerated, and correctional officers. He authored more than 30 books including Violent Men: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Violence; Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival; and Stress in Policing.
A fellow of the American Society of Criminology and of the American Psychological Association, Hans served as president of the American Association of Forensic Psychology.
He is survived by his children, Jay and Michelle; and two grandchildren.
Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.