Pubdate: Mon, 01 Mar 2004
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Douglas Martin
Related: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n289/a01.html

JOAN MCCORD, WHO EVALUATED ANTICRIME EFFORTS, DIES AT 73

Joan McCord, a criminologist who marshaled mountains of evidence to
question the effectiveness of social programs championed by both
liberals and conservatives, died Tuesday at her home in Narberth, Pa.
She was 73.

The cause was lung cancer, said her son, Robert.

In 12 books and many other writings, Dr. McCord, a professor at Temple
University, disputed the effectiveness in fighting crime of boys'
clubs, summer camps, programs in which young offenders visit prisons,
D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and other popular programs.

The first woman to be president of the American Society of
Criminology, she was known for her use of longitudinal studies, which
follow subjects for many years. Her goal was to examine the long-term
effects of programs, ranging from individual mentoring programs often
favored by conservatives to social work efforts frequently advocated
by liberals.

Dr. McCord believed that just as the government monitors the
effectiveness of pharmaceuticals, the public should examine data to
determine if well-meaning interventions to help people might, in fact,
be harmful. Often, she found that programs had no built-in procedure
to evaluate their success.

More troubling, she said, was that officials sometimes resisted
evaluation of programs, in part because they regarded it as an affront
to their good intentions. She also said she sensed a fear that solid
criticism of one social program might brand all as ineffective.

"That fear, perhaps justified in some quarters, would be like blocking
publication of damaging effects of Celebrex, thalidomide, or estrogen
because the publication could slow work in disease prevention," she
wrote in the May 2003 issue of The Annals, the publication of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Her best-known longitudinal study was her 1978 follow-up on a
youth-mentoring program done 30 years earlier in Cambridge and
Somerville, Mass. She found that boys at high risk who had been given
mentors, health-care services and summer camp fared worse in later
life than a similar group of boys who were given nothing special. The
250 boys who got special services were more likely to become
criminals, have trouble in their jobs and marriages, and become
alcoholics, according to court, hospital and other records noted in
her study.

A possible reason, Dr. McCord suggested, was that those boys had felt
they were given the attention because something was wrong with them,
making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her theory was that the boys who
went to summer camp modeled themselves after camp troublemakers.

The counterintuitive result contradicted the statements of two-thirds
of the participants that the program had helped them by giving them
better values and keeping them off the streets.

In other studies, she found that some youths counseled by
court-appointed volunteers fared worse than those who received no
counseling. Her statistical analysis of a program in Australia that
provided recreation for troubled adolescents found bad effects. And
participants in the Scared Straight program, which takes young
offenders from many locales to visit prisons, were arrested more often
than a control group, she found.

She said that D.A.R.E., the popular nationwide "just say no" drug
education program in which law enforcement officers spend time in
schools talking about drugs, alcohol and violence, may actually have
contributed to drug use, according to her analysis of statistics from
the program.

Joan Fish was born in Manhattan on Aug. 4, 1930. After graduating from
Stanford in 1952, she did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard and
Stanford. She earned her doctorate in sociology from Stanford in 1968.

She wrote some of her early papers with her first husband, William M.
McCord. Their marriage ended in divorce. Both he and her second
husband, Carl A. Silver, are dead.

Dr. McCord is survived by her sons, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord of Durham,
N.C., and Robert McCord of Bryn Mawr, Pa.; her ward, whom she regarded
as a family member, Tom Underwood of Boston; her brother, Robert Fish
of Santa Cruz, Calif.; her sister, Connie Arnosti of Milwaukee; and
four grandsons.

Her often pithy remarks appeared in articles about crime in many
newspapers and magazines. The New York Times in 1996 asked her about a
12-year-old arrested on charges of gang rape and murder and who was
turned in by his mother.

Of the mother's dilemma, Dr. McCord said, "It's almost impossible to
imagine a good thing to do with a gun-toting 12-year-old."
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