Joan McCord

Joan Fish McCord (1930-2004) was an American criminologist. She graduated from Stanford University in philosophy and then did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, followed by a masters in education, also from Harvard University, and then a Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford. Her early publications were with her first husband, the sociologist William Maxwell McCord. In 1987 she became the first female president of the American Society of Criminology. She is particularly known for experimental longitudinal studies of mentoring programmes, 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.