Joan McCord


Joan Fish McCord was an American professor of Criminology at Temple University and a recipient of an ASC Award.

Early life

Joan McCord was born as Joan Fish on August 4, 1930 in Manhattan, New York. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in philosophy and did graduate work at Harvard University, followed by a master's degree in education, also from Harvard University, and then a Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford.

Career

Criminologist

In 1980 she joined the faculty in Drexel University. In 1989 she became the first female president of the American Society of Criminology. She is particularly known for experimental longitudinal studies of mentoring programmes, especially the Cambridge Somerville Youth Study, often showing they had counterintuitive negative effects. She also studied the causes of juvenile delinquency, and wrote about alcoholism and psychopathy. She is said to have made unique contributions by merging philosophical thinking with empirical social sciences. In 1996 she was questioned by The New York Times regarding a rape committed by a 12-year old.

Author

Aside from being a criminologist Joan McCord was known for her editorial work, particularly chapter four of the Cures That Harm which came out in The New York Times in 2002. Her essays on criminology were published postmortem by her son Geoffrey Sayre-McCord in 2007.

TV

She also credited for appearing in Scared Straight!, a documentary on juvenile delinquents.

Personal life

Joan McCord was married to her first husband, the sociologist William Maxwell McCord, with whom she had co-authored numerous early publications. She divorced him soon after and married Carl A. Silver instead, with whom she had two sons Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, and Robert McCord. She also have a brother in Santa Cruz, California, a sister Connie Arnosti in Milwaukee. and four grandchildren. She died from lung cancer in Narberth, Pennsylvania, on February 24, 2004.