James Gilligan

James Gilligan is an American expert on violence. He is currently an adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law and clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. The former director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry, he is best known as the author of a series of books entitled Violence.

Education Gilligan obtained a BA from Harvard College in 1957, and trained at the Schools of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University (1961-1965), the University of Chicago (1965-1966), and Harvard University (1966-1969).

Academic career In 1966, Gilligan joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he served until 2000. In 1977, Gilligan became the director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry.

In 1991 Gilligan was invited to deliver the Erikson Lectures at Harvard University on the roots of violence. During 1993 and 1994 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge in England, where he expanded his lectures into the book, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, published in 1996 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, and republished in paperback in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1997 by Vintage Books and Jessica Kingsley. In 1999, Gilligan was elected president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy.

Gilligan joined the faculty at New York University in 2002, Known for his use of English literature, he lectured on the relationship between psychology, law and world literature, teaching the works of William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Violence prevention

Massachusetts Prisons In 1992, the U.S. District Court in Boston and the Massachusetts Supreme Court—reacting to an epidemic of suicides, homicides, riots, hostage-taking, arson, and mass rapes throughout the state prison system—concluded that much of the violence was the result of severe, undiagnosed, and untreated psychopathology, brought about by the pathogenic conditions within the prisons themselves, such as prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, death threats, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the absence of mental health services. In response, the Boston and Massachusetts Courts ordered the state to bring the level of health care and violence prevention in the prisons up to community standards.

The Massachusetts Department of Correction entered a contract with McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School to fulfill the obligation. As the McLean Hospital clinician selected to serve as Medical Director of Bridgewater State Hospital, the Massachusetts Prison Hospital for the "criminally insane," and Clinical Director of Mental Health Services for state prisons, Dr. Gilligan supervised the training and clinical practice of Harvard psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals. During his tenure as Medical Director of Bridgewater State Hospital, the team succeeded in preventing all further riots from the beginning of the program, and all hostage-taking by the fifth year of the program, reducing the rates of both suicide and homicide to zero for up to a year at a time throughout the state-wide prison system.

Boston Miracle In 1996, Paul F. Evans, Commissioner of the Boston Police Department, requested the Dr. Gilligan outline methods to end an epidemic of youth homicides, which tripled by the end of the 1990s. In response, Gilligan organized a group of experts drawn from Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and the Kennedy School of Government to design an inter-disciplinary strategy, in collaboration with local clergy and churches, juvenile courts, educators in the Massachusetts school system, police, parole and probation officers, gun dealers, gang members, and families of at-risk youth, to end the epidemic of violence. The program resulted in two and a half years without a single teenage or adult victim of homicide in the City of Boston, a phenomenon referred to as the "Boston Miracle."

Personal life Gilligan is the husband of American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.

Selected works

Books Violence - Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes – 1996 Violence - Reflections on a National Epidemic – 1997 Violence - Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic – 1999 Violence - Reflections on a Western Epidemic – 2000 Violence in California Prisons: A Proposal for Research into Patterns and Cures – 2000 Preventing Violence – 2001 Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous to Your Health Than Others – 2011