Ron Kramer

Dr. Ron Kramer is professor of sociology and the former Director of the Criminal Justice Program (1992-2017). 

Kramer received his Ph.D. in sociology (specializing in criminology and law) from the Ohio State University in 1978. His research specialties within criminology are corporate and state crimes, international law, and the social prevention of crime. He also does research on the sociological history of the sport of baseball and the social impacts of The 1960s.

Kramer’s latest book, Apocalyptic Crimes: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2025. His award-winning book, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes was published by Rutgers in 2020. Kramer is also the co-author of State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government (Rutgers University Press, 2006), Crimes of the American Nuclear State: At Home and Abroad, (Northeastern University Press,1998), and co-editor of State Crime in the Global Age (Willan Press, 2010). 

Kramer hosts the award-winning television program Critical Issues, Alternative Views, which airs on the Public Media Network in Kalamazoo. From 1987 to 1995 he was the Co-Producer and Host of the community access television program WMU Forum. He is a founding co-chair of the WMU Working Group on Climate Change.

In 1981, Kramer was awarded the WMU Alumni Association Teaching Excellence Award. He is also the 2004 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Critical Criminology. In 2012 he received the Larry T. Reynolds Award for Outstanding Teaching of Sociology from the Michigan Sociological Association and in 2017 the Charles Horton Cooley Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Sociology, also from the Michigan Sociological Association.