Prevention Research in Schools

The August Vollmer Award Address is intended to focus on contributions to justice and on the recipient's research and policy experiences. This is a story of one person's career devoted mainly to developing effective collaborations between researchers and practitioners to produce useful knowledge. Her early work focused on delinquency prevention in schools and included evaluations of two different efforts aimed at altering school and classroom environments to reduce student misbehavior in Charleston, SC, schools, and an organization development intervention intended to reduce violence and related problem behaviors in Baltimore City, MD, schools. For many years, the author directed a project that provided research expertise to the Maryland Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention. She also partnered with public agencies to develop and implement randomized experiments to test the effectiveness of the Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court, the Strengthening Families Program in Washington, D.C., and afterschool programs in Baltimore County, MD. She is currently implementing a randomized trial of a gang prevention program in Philadelphia, PA, and a study of the effects of School Resource Officers in Florida and California.