Book Review: Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing by Toch, H.

• Published date: 01 September 2015
• Date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854815572875
• Author: Phyllis Wentworth
• Subject Matter: Book Review

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 9, September 2015, 969 –971.

DOI: 10.1177/0093854815572875

© 2015 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

969

BOOK REVIEW

Toch, H. (2014). Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology

in Prisons and Policing. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 186 pp. ISBN 978-1-4338-

1729-8 (hardback 49.95; ebook $39.96)

Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons

and Policing is a short book that encapsulates the highlights and insights of a long, distinguished

career. Hans Toch, professor emeritus at State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, has worked

at the intersection of social psychology and criminal justice for more than half a century, publishing

his first book in 1965. His emphasis has been on “doing” psychology—on the real-world application

of organizational principles within prisons and police work. The book tells the story of the reforms

he has sought and the warnings he has sounded. As the pendulum has swung back and forth with

regard to public support for rehabilitation and reform, he has seen some promising programs, built

on science he supported, be defunded, and some concerning programs, built on science he considered

misapplied, be extended. Whether you are new to his work or have followed it across the decades,

this intellectual history is versatile—with the potential to serve as an introductory overview or a

capstone.

A theme of the first two chapters of the book, which are devoted to his formative years, is selec-

tive perception. When Toch entered the doctoral program at Princeton in 1952, Hadley Cantril was

chair of the department. A social psychologist, Cantril was interested in social movements, yet at the

time he was intrigued with the work of Adelbert Ames, the ophthalmologist who had created the

Ames room to study optical illusions. Although strictly relegated to the field of visual perception

today, Toch reminds us that during the 1950s, Ames’s work had captured the imagination of a broad

range of intellectuals, including John Dewey. Ames’s clever demonstrations showed that when pre-

sented with unfamiliar shapes and objects, we, unconsciously, out of all the possible interpretations

available, perceive familiar things—underlining, in a dramatic fashion at the time, the way in which

past experience shapes interpretation of the present and future. Based on this foundational principle,

Toch developed a life-long professional conviction: Perception is a creative act, and to understand

individuals under study, it is important to reconstruct their past and view the world as they experi-

enced it.

As discussed in the third and fourth chapters of the book, during the 1960s and the war on poverty,

Toch partnered on more than one occasion with Doug Grant, psychologist and chief of research at the

California Department of Corrections. Grant directed a federally funded prison program called the

“New Careers Development Project” (1964-1966), which was designed to train offenders for job

opportunities in the human services industry. The premise of the program was that the ex-offender’s

past would serve him well as he used it in the service of better understanding and helping others.

Building on this premise, Toch trained current offenders to serve as paraprofessionals, assisting him

and other research professionals to gather data and perform data analysis on the effectiveness of the

program. Some new careerist ex-offenders went on to become quite successful (one source reports

that two of them earned their doctorates and became university professors), whereas others fell vic-

tim to various forms of resistance—both internal and external. But the program itself did not exist

long enough to grow roots; the funding dried up as more conservative politicians were elected (e.g.,

Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1966) and the war on poverty lost its momentum.

572875CJBXXX10.1177/0093854815572875Criminal Justice and BehaviorBook Review

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