Bringing Scientific Thinking to Criminal Justice Work
Author: John Gannon.
Source: Volume 23, Number 01, Fall 2013 , pp.7-12(6)
< previous article |next article > |return to table of contents
Abstract:
Dr. John Gannon, executive director of the International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology, was the speaker at the Edwin I. Megargee Honorary Lecture during the September ICCA conference in Reno, Nevada. In his provocative speech, Gannon presented a range of ideas and concepts that provided considerable fodder for practitioners to mull over and digest. Gannon discussed forces that block remediation and a reading of evidence-based practice that may be controversial (the evidence rules out what doesn’t work rather than rules in what works). He reviewed the current debates and dialogues and used Kuhn’s scientific revolution thesis to shed light on these debates—and in some cases disagreements—between various schools of correctional thought. He talked about folk criminology and the folk practitioner and what can be learned if we pay attention to the evidence.Keywords: Remediation, evidence-based practice, correctional schools of thought, folk criminology, kinds of offenders, Edwin I. Megargee
Affiliations:
1: International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology.