Crime and the Life-Course, Prevention, Experiments, and Truth Seeking: Joan McCord's Pioneering Contributions to Criminology

Abstract

A life-span developmental approach describes Joan McCord's career and highlights her pioneering contributions to criminology and, more broadly, to understanding human development. The main focus of this article is on her exceptional scientific contributions through the assessment of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study experimental preventive intervention. We highlight her efforts to understand how a delinquency prevention intervention caused iatrogenic effects and the lessons she drew for evaluation research. Important contributions to key issues in developmental criminology are summarized, such as the different roles of mothers, fathers, and neighborhoods in the development of delinquency as well as the importance of differentiating discipline from punishment. We describe how Dr. McCord relied on philosophy, how she tackled oppositions between theory-driven and data-driven research in criminology, and how she helped young investigators learn how to learn, and we end by highlighting her contributions to the organization and development of criminology in the United States and around the world.

Early Developmental Crime Prevention Forged through Knowledge Translation: A Window into a Century of Prevention Experiments

“…In the words of McCord (2003, p. 17), "Unless social programs are evaluated for potential harm as well as benefit, safety as well as efficacy, the choice of which social programs to use will remain a dangerous guess." Moreover, far from curtailing policy interest in a developmental approach to delinquency prevention or dampening the need for developmental prevention experiments, the harmful effects reported in the third followup instead helped to influence new longitudinal-experimental studies in developmental and life-course criminology (Tremblay et al, 2019). In the next section, we profile one of these studies, the Montréal Longitudinal-Experimental Study, which was "designed to prevent the iatrogenic effects of interventions she [Joan McCord] had identified" (Tremblay and Farrington, 2004, p. 6).…”

La estructura ocupacional de los presos en México previo a su detención: una adaptación de los datos de la ENPOL 2016

“…Estos datos los presentamos con dos lentes simultaneas: criminología de curso de vida y transiciones sociodemográficas (Elder, 1988;Evans, 2002;Mora y de Oliveira, 2009: Echarri y Pérez Amador, 2007Tremblay, et. al.…”

The Illicit Ecosystem of Hacking: A Longitudinal Network Analysis of Website Defacement Groups

“…There is also reason to believe these findings carry over to online settings, where the most active groups within the hacking community receive the greatest recognition and provide a pool of affiliates from which to confer and receive social status (Dècary-Hetu et al, 2012). By scaling up the unit of analysis to the group-level, greater insight can be drawn into the interventions designed to disrupt group formation as well as individual-level explanations of joining or leaving groups (McGloin & Nguyen, 2013; Tremblay et al, 2019). Therefore, to better understand the individual proclivities among hackers, the social dynamics of their group behavior must be better understood.…”