Module 05: Reflection Assignment 5: Shelley and Gendreau Discuss Dr. Gendreau’s Career Path

Shelley Brown: Welcome, everyone. I’m here with Dr. Paul Gendreau to get his insights on a number of issues germane to correctional treatment. We’re going to start, though, with one important question. I need to know, and the students want to know, how you first get involved in corrections.

Paul Gendreau: Well, that’s a long story, but it’s one of my favorite topics because it was an interesting trip. And I think now things are more programmed as to how you get involved in an area. But when I was a youth, that is a teenager in the ’50s, how anything happened to me was not anything of my own intention.

It was sort of like a Sliding Doors. Remember that famous movie? You walk down this street instead of that street, something happens. And that changes the direction in your life and also family. So after I graduated from Fisher Park High, and it took me two years to get through a grade 13 with about a 57% average, I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do.

So for no particular reason, well, I thought I’d go on to the university and at least get a BA. And a back in those days, universities were taking just about any living body unlike now where you have to be almost an A or A plus student to get anywhere. And so Ottawa U, I majored in basketball and golf. I played on the basketball team with Alex Trebek. You should know this, students may not know who he is, but Jeopardy. And I was also captain of the golf team. And I also took a few courses.

And by the way, one of my inspirations was that I went to high school with Paul Anka. Now, maybe no one, you wouldn’t even remember who Paul Anka is.

Shelley Brown: Oh, I do. He’s got a street named after him in Ottawa.

Paul Gendreau: Good. Good show. So after I got my BA, then I had to decide what to do with my life. And one direction I could have gone into, and I sometimes regret it, is in radio. I was interviewed at CFRA to join the group there. And I thought, well, I always wanted to be a disc jockey.

And I pursued that kind of career later on in life when I was an academic and I used to have a jazz and blues show. The other was to go into the golf business in some way or maybe continue on in some directionless kind of way. So I decided after my BA to carry on. And it was mainly through the engineering of my father. He was Deputy Commissioner of Corrections in Canada. That’s the old Canadian Penitentiary Service which I should note, and I always like to make this point, the Canadian Penitentiary Service consisted of a General Gibson, my father, another chap, an accountant, and four secretaries. And they ran the whole system.

Now, that’s almost sort of laughable these days. So my father engineered through nepotism my becoming an intern in the Kingston area. And I started out at Kingston Penitentiary in 1961. And I was assigned to the psychiatric unit. And as I got more training there, some of my clients, again, I’m living in the past, but one of my clients was William Boyd, the famous bank robber in Canada. The other was Steven Truscott, who you might remember was finally exonerated and so on and so forth.

And during those early internship era, Don Andrews joined the crew, about a year after I started. And Don and I worked together. We had many discussions about things. And we sort of reinforced each other.

And after getting my doctorate, I then took my first academic job at Trent University. And guess what my specialty area was? Well, you’d never know. Classical eyelid conditioning. Because back then

Shelley Brown: So what is that exactly?

Paul Gendreau: You see, you’re even asking the question. That’s how arcane that area was. But it’s a way of conditioning, using classical or instrumental procedures. And you can find it possibly in the little fine print in any introductory psych in the experimental learning area. And I was going to become a pure experimental psychologist.

Shelley Brown: So some Pavlovian-based stuff?

Paul Gendreau: Yeah. And comparing

Shelley Brown: Classical conditioning?

Paul Gendreau: Yeah. One of the big issues at the time, hope I’m not inducing narcolepsy here. But one of the big issues at the time was, is there a difference between classical and instrumental conditioning? And so I was involved in that research area. And while at Trent, I somehow fell back into the corrections area.

I vowed after my early experience in corrections that I wanted to leave the field behind. And then, a fellow called Tom Surridge, a PhD in experimental psychology, was Director of Research at the Interior Ministry of Correctional Services. And he said, would you like to come aboard as a researcher and do all kinds of interesting things? So I left this esoteric experimental area of research in learning and got back into corrections.

And from then on, my career stayed in the field. And I left Trent after four years, went into the Interior Ministry of Correctional Services as a clinician administrator and so on and so forth.

Shelley Brown: And the rest is history.

Read this interview and answer the following questions.

How did Dr. Gendreau end up in corrections?

Was his career path what you expected?