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His doctoral thesis, on foster care in Devon, was later published as In Place of Parents (1960).In 1955 he joined the Prison Service as one of the first prison psychologists and began his career in Wandsworth, where he administered innumerable personality and intelligence tests to inmates. So many inmates were tested that they became familiar with the questions and passed them around. Thereafter he worked at Winchester Prison, testing prisoners and writing reports for court. In the 1950s this was the stuff of prison psychology.In 1957 Trasler left the Prison Service to take up a post as lecturer in the Psychology Department at Southampton University, where he remained for 37 years. In the early days he was almost single-handedly responsible for teaching a large part of the Social Science Faculty’s degree programme, including social institutions, sociological theory and methodology.Appointed Professor in 1964, he was then one of the youngest professors in the country. The honour, however, came with expectations with which Trasler struggled for much of his life.

He set high standards for himself and was his own most demanding critic. His research and publications were wide-ranging, with an emphasis on psychopathy, youth crime and treatment for offenders. He was a member of several government committees on criminal justice: the Advisory Council on the Penal System, the Wootton Committee on Non-custodial Penalties and the Younger Committee on Young Adult Offenders.He had the true scientist’s capacity to see the limits of his own perspective, writing in 1973: It must be admitted that the present state of research into criminal behaviour offers some encouragement to those who oppose any attempt to construct a formal theory of criminality.And again in 1987: There is. great vagueness as to the characteristics being transmitted genetically, and there is no reliable evidence implicating abnormal chromosome complements, or damage or malformation, with increased risk of crime in general, or of violent crime in particular. Attempts to demonstrate that delinquents (or, in more general terms, offenders) are poor learners, or are resistant to conditioning, have not been successful.His wish to apply psychology is reflected in his work on foster care and the evaluation of offender treatment programmes, and in his willingness to serve as a magistrate. In 1990 he was awarded the Sellin-Glueck Award by the American Society of Criminology, one of the very few psychologists to have achieved this distinction. He found it enormously difficult to receive the award before the large and distinguished audience; such public attention gave him agony.After retirement from Southampton in 1994, he became Vice-President of the Centre for Crime and Criminal Justice Studies at King’s College London.Gloria Laycock, Ken Pease and Peter Venables.

BYRON WHITE had a career which in today’s pressurised and compartmentalised world would be unimaginable – combining brilliant legal scholarship with a dazzling if short-lived spell as a top-flight professional sportsman. Never again, it may confidently be asserted, will a man star in the National Football League and then scale an even loftier peak in the legal profession, perched as a Justice of the Supreme Court for more than three decades. Byron Raymond White, lawyer and footballer: born Fort Collins, Colorado 8 June 1917; Deputy Attorney General of the United States 1961-62; Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court 1962-93; married 1946 Marion Stearns (one son, one daughter); died Denver, Colorado 15 April 2002.
Byron White had a career which in today’s pressurised and compartmentalised world would be unimaginable – combining brilliant legal scholarship with a dazzling if short-lived spell as a top-flight professional sportsman. Kennedy to the court then headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren at the height of its liberal activism in the early 1960s. In those initial days however he would often prove a conservative odd man out. Only as the court – and American society itself – shifted rightwards did he move into its intellectual mainstream.