Implementing Legal Policies Through Operant Conditioning

One serious obstacle to the achievement of social change in America has been the intransigence of large bureaucracies toward changes in goals, procedures, and styles. Although programs ad infinitum to remedy evils such as poverty, segregation, crime, and pollution are proposed and even written into law, the day-to-day operation of our political institutions often fails to reflect these innovations. Thus we are unable to evaluate the merits of alternative solutions to such ills because they are never given the test of full-fledged implementation.In this paper I am going to suggest various measures to modify the behavior of one important political institution which has been staunchly resistant to change-the police. Our under standing of police operations is still quite limited (due partially to the secretive nature of most departments), but as David Easton (1969) has argued, social scientists have an obligation to use whatever intellectual tools are at their disposal to obtain "quick, short-run answers" to questions of pressing social concern. To this end, what follows is an attempt to apply some principles of learning theory (developed largely in highly-structured psychology laboratories on infra-human subjects) to the chaotic environment of the cop on the beat

Conditioning · Criminology · Operant conditioning · Political science · Reinforcement · Behavioral and Psychological Studies · Educational Assessment and Improvement · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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