AEC Fellows: Denise C. Gottfredson

Denise C. Gottfredson University of Maryland at College Park website Email: dgottfredson@crim.umd.edu Office: 301-405-4717 Fax: 301-405-4733

Denise C. Gottfredson is a Professor at the University of Maryland Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. She received a Ph.D. in Social Relations from The Johns Hopkins University, where she specialized in Sociology of Education. D. Gottfredson's research interests include delinquency and delinquency prevention, and particularly the effects of school environments on youth behavior. Gottsfredson has recently completed randomized experiments to test the effectiveness of the Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court and the Strengthening Families Program in Washington D.C. She is currently directing a randomized trial of the effects of after school programs on the development of problem behavior. Gottfredson has contributed to the literature of school-based crimeprevention by testing specific strategies and more recently by summarizing the literature. Her earlier evaluations include Project PATHE, an environmental approach to delinquency prevention; a three-year organization development intervention to reduce violence and related problem behaviors in two troubled Baltimore City junior high school; and a three-year effort in eight Charleston, South Carolina middle schools aimed at altering school and classroom environments to reduce student misbehavior. Another was a study of the effects on subsequent criminal behavior of removing serious juvenile offenders from a training school. Recently, she has provided several useful summaries of the literature on school-based prevention. These efforts include a report to the U.S. Congress on what works, what doesn't work, and what is promising in school-based crime prevention and several subsequent articles and chapters that have re-evaluated this literature using meta-analysis. She worked on a recent National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools, which described the nature and quality of the school-based prevention practices as they are implemented in typical school settings. She also has a recent book on school-based delinquency prevention. . Much of Gottfredson's career has been devoted to developing effectivecollaborations between researchers and practitioners. She directs a project that provides research expertise to the Maryland Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention in its efforts to promote effective prevention practices in Maryland. Gottfredson has recently completed randomized experiments to test the effectiveness of the Baltimore City Drug Treatment Court and the Strengthening Families Program in Washington D.C. She also directs an evaluation of the Maryland After School Opportunity Fund Program, a large-scale after school initiative in Maryland.

 

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