Sorrentino, Anthony

Anthony Sorrentino (1913-2005) was a Chicago sociologist, scholar, and civic leader of Italian descent. Sorrentino worked with the Chicago Area Project (1934-1938) and later as a sociologist at the Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR; 1938-1957). In 1957, Sorrentino's work at the IJR was transferred to the Illinois Youth Commission, and in the 1970s to the Department of Corrections. In 1975, Governor Daniel Walker appointed Sorrentino Executive Director of the newly formed Commission on Delinquency Prevention. Sorrentino was founder of the West Side Community Committee, co-founder of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, and active in other neighborhood and Italian American civic and cultural organizations.

Sociologist and writer Anthony Sorrentino was born in Marsala, Italy, on October 23, 1913. He immigrated to the United States in 1919 and grew up in the Italian community of the Near West Side of Chicago. Sorrentino received a Bachelor of Science degree from Lewis Institute (later Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1938 and did graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago from 1939-1944. While a student there, he met sociologist Dr. Clifford R. Shaw. From 1934-1938, Sorrentino served as a staff member for the Chicago Area Project (CAP), a pioneering program founded by Shaw based on the principles of community organization, self-determination, and the use of indigenous neighborhood leaders to address problems of juvenile delinquency. From 1938 to 1957, he was a Junior Assistant Research Sociologist and later Supervising Sociologist with the Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR). In 1957, when the field services staff of the Department of Social Services of the IJR came under the jurisdiction of the Illinois Youth Commission, Sorrentino became Assistant Superintendent of Community Services for the Cook County Unit. In the 1970s, after the Illinois Youth Commission became part of the newly created Illinois Department of Corrections, Sorrentino helped lead the fight to establish a Commission on Delinquency Prevention. Governor Daniel Walker appointed Sorrentino Executive Director of the new commission. Sorrentino assisted Shaw with delinquency prevention and treatment workshops at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, and in 1960 began to lecture in sociology part-time at DePaul University. Sorrentino has written numerous scholarly articles on the causes and prevention of juvenile delinquency and is the author of The Delinquent and His Neighbors (1975), Organizing Against Crime: Redeveloping the Neighborhood (1977), and How To Organize the Neighborhood for Delinquency Prevention (1979). Sorrentino was also a founder of the West Side Community Committee, co-founder of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Supreme Council of the Italo-American National Union, and a President of the Italian Cultural Center in Stone Park, Illinois.