NEW YORK — Morris Lasker, the judge who sentenced Ivan Boesky to prison in a 1980s insider trading scandal and helped eliminate horrid conditions in New York City jails, has died. He was 92.

His son, Timothy Lasker of Chilmark, said Lasker died Friday in Cambridge, Mass., from cancer.

Lasker, born in Hartsdale, N.Y., in July 1917, was appointed to the federal bench in 1967. He served 25 years in Manhattan before transferring to Boston, where he worked for 15 years.

In 1987, he sentenced Boesky to three years in prison in what was then Wall Street’s biggest insider trading case, saying it was essential to incarcerate white-collar criminals.

“Breaking the law is breaking the law,” Lasker said. “Some kind of message must be sent to the business community that such activities cannot be wholly repaired simply by repaying people after the fact.”

For more than two decades, Lasker presided over lawsuits seeking to change brutal conditions in New York City jails, where suicides once occurred weekly. He ordered changes, and the city spent more than $1 billion improving conditions.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz, a former Legal Aid lawyer who represented inmates in the lawsuits, recalled Lasker’s role in the litigation, saying he was likely the “pre-eminent figure in the United States in the area of jail reform.”