Winner's Way

KIRKLAND R. GABLE

Kirkland has combined three careers. His career as a psychologist began with an Ed.D. in counseling psychology from Harvard University and later a Ph.D. in social psychology from City University Los Angeles. He has specialized in the treatment of severely delinquent youths and women shoplifters. His graduate research at Harvard involved paying delinquents for participating in interviews while positively reinforcing their prosocial behavior. These techniques greatly reduced the crime rate of these youths compared to a similar group of delinquents.

He has been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Harvard Medical School. He has also served as the Chairperson of the Crime and Delinquency Review Committee of the National Institute of Mental Health. He was the Assistant Editor of the International Journal of Psychiatry. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at California Lutheran University.

Kirkland is also a lawyer. He has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and was on the staff of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He has written or co-authored eight books and monographs on law and psychology and published over fifty articles. One of his articles on the legal rights of mentally ill patients was cited in a majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court.

He is an inventor. He and his twin brother, Robert S. Gable (also a psychologist and lawyer), are the co-inventors of the electronic location monitoring system widely used for the home detention of offenders. The Gable brothers have written extensively about the use of electronic monitoring as an alternative to imprisonment and as means for effectively rehabilitating offenders. Kirkland also has patents on a novelty radio and a car camera. He has a patent pending on energy storage systems.

His name has slowly morphed over the years from “R. Kirkland Schwitzgebel” to“ R. Kirkland Gable” to “Kirkland R. Gable.”