Before joining GSU, Wright was Curator's Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at The University of Missouri-St. Louis where he served on faculty from 1984–2014, and where he twice served as Department Chair. Previous to working at UMSL, he was a Research Fellow then Senior Research Fellow with the Cambridge Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies in Criminology and the British Journal of Sociology. Wright has published widely in the area of offender decision-making, with particular focus on urban street criminals, including residential burglars, armed robbers, carjackers, and drug dealers. He is known as a mixed methods researcher, employing face-to-face interviews, surveys, and quantitative techniques to study offending. His qualitative research is a derivative of ethnography, and notable for its use of semi-structured interviews with active offenders, a technique not widely used in the social sciences because of the challenges associated with recruiting and working with noninstitutionalized street criminals. This work has made him the de facto founder of the "St. Louis School" of criminological research, an inductive reasoning approach which focuses on the cognitive, affective, and situational dynamics inherent in the foreground of crime rather than the background explanations typically associated with sociological criminology. Wright's more recent work is on the intersection between advances in technology and crime trends, with a specific focus on the how the increasing replacement of cash with digital payments will impact street crime Wright is the author or co-author of six books and more than seventy scholarly articles and book chapters. These include his best known works, Armed Robbers in Action and Burglars on the Job, which won the 1994-95 Outstanding Scholarship in Crime and Delinquency Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. These, as well as his co-authored books with Bruce Jacobs and Scott Jacques are noteworthy for their reliance on interviews with active offenders. Wright is also co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Fieldwork with Dick Hobbs.
Works
Burglars on Burglary: Prevention and the Offender, with Trevor Bennett, 1984,
Burglars on the Job: Streetlife and Residential Break-Ins, with Scott H. Decker, 1994,
Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture, with Scott H. Decker, 1997,
Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld, with Bruce A. Jacobs, 2006,
Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealer, with Scott T. Jacques, 2015,
