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2 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 1 (1965)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd2 and id is 1 raw text is: The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency VOLUME 2 JANUARY 1965 NUMBER 1 Correctional Research: An Elusive Paradise* DANIEL GLASER Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois Ph.D. (Sociology), 1954, University of Chicago Criminologists repeatedly have envisioned academic Utopias in pisons, courts, and other agencies handling criminals. In their dream worlds, research would guide practice and practi- tioners would support research. Such promising arrangements, though sometimes initiated, have never been fully achieved. Their failure involved either co6ptation of academicians by ad- ministrators, in which instances research goals were abandoned, or divergence of research and operations into separate and largely autonomous social systems. New advances toward this elusive ideal have recently been in- dicated at several points. These gains seem to require the institutionalization of rationality in correction through (1) legislative demands for change and for hard criteria of achieve- ment in coping with criminals; (2) bridging of traditional admin- istrathie boundaries between police, courts, prisons, and parole; and (3) research designs which accommodate the conflicting or- ganizational goals of correctional systems. T HE HISTORY OF CORRECTIONAL RE- SEARCH resembles the history of religion. There have been successive periods of discontent, new cults promising simple solutions, and social movements institutionalizing the new approaches in judicial or correctional practice. But dis- content recurs, and new movements continually emerge. SCIENCE AS SALVATION Commitment to a penal policy has almost always rested purely on faith * Paper prepared for a panel on Crime, Soci- ology and Social Policy, at 59th Annual Meet- ing, American Sociological Association, Montreal, 1 964. 1 in its efficacy, or on a selfish interest in it, rather than on empirical evidence proving that it achieves its professed purposes. Yet proponents of each way of treating criminals, whether it be cap- ital punishment or solitary confinement, hard labor or nondirective counseling, have all asserted that their method suc- ceeds, either in changing criminals or in deterring others from becoming crim- inals. The literature proposing penal standards, from Old Testament injunc- tions to Beccaria's essay, from Bentham's felicific calculus to the latest pro- nouncements of prison psychiatrists, is replete with empirical claims. But this literature is almost uniformly deficient

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