Dr. James Gilligan

Thursday, April 14, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Swarthmore Friends Meeting House, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA

With a professional lifetime of experience with violent human beings in violence producing environments, Dr. Gilligan proposes that we employ what we have learned about the causes of violence to overhaul our criminal justice system.

Dr. James Gilligan is currently director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Pennsylvania. A psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for over 30 years. He has devoted his career to the study of what makes violent individuals violent and what can be done to prevent violence. He served as medical director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, clinical director of mental health services for the Massachusetts prison system, and director of the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and the Centre for the Study of Violence. Dr. Gilligan is the author of the acclaimed Violence:Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997), an examination of the violence epidemic in America and its connection to shame. More recently, he wrote Preventing Violence, in which he proposes a radically new way of thinking about violence and how to prevent it.

Dr. Gilligan has also served as President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy­an international organization of mental health professionals who are attempting to find ways to heal and, where possible, prevent the individual and social pathologies of which violent behavior is the most destructive symptom. Dr. Gilligan has taught, lectured, and served around the world as a psychiatric consultant on violent crime and punishment, including terrorism and war crimes, youth treatment and rehabilitation, and incarcerated adults. His innovative and effective violence prevention program designs are hailed by the World Health Organization, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Poland, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice, and by many other noted organizations and governments worldwide. In April 2003, Physicians for Social Responsibility honored Dr. Gilligan with its “2003 Achievement Award.”