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Creating change in the legal system

Contributions from community psychology

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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

Focuses on the potential contributions that community psychology models can make to theory, research, and practice in the area of psychology and law. The author, in his presidential address to the American Psychology-Law Society, looks specifically at the criminal and juvenile justice systems and the impact that these systems, and law and policy more broadly, have on individuals. He argues that community psychology perspectives would help shift the focus away from the disproportionate and often incorrect emphasis that our system of justice places on individual deficit models and individual level interventions, and concludes that a community psychology approach would also reinforce efforts to promote prevention programs that in the long term might prove more effective in dealing with the problem of crime in our society.

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  1. P.O. Box 8014-153, 98231, Blaine, WA

    Ronald Roesch

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  1. Ronald Roesch
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Correspondence to Ronald Roesch.

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This article is a revised version of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) Presidential Address, read at the American Psychological Association Convention, Los Angeles, August, 1994. I want to thank Ray Corrado, Steve Hart, John Monahan, Jim Ogloff, Julian Rappaport, Dick Reppucci, Kathy Roesch, and Ed Seidman for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Simon Fraser University.

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Roesch, R. Creating change in the legal system. Law Hum Behav 19, 325–343 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01499135

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