Court-Ordered Psychological Assessment

Violence Risk Assessment

Frequently, criminal courts call on mental health professionals to evaluate the dangerousness of violent and sex offenders. The main goal of these evaluations is to determine the likelihood that an individual will commit violent crimes, either now or in the future. Since violent behavior is not all that common, prediction can often lead to an extremely elevated number of false positives. A false positive mistakenly identifies someone as a future risk when in fact they are not. This may result in offenders being inappropriately incarcerated or denied release from prison.

Certain characteristics, such as the nature and seriousness of the crime, arrest and conviction history, and substance abuse, have been related to predicting the probability that an offender will commit a new violent crime. The idea that mental health professionals can predict future violence is very controversial. Should an offender be released once he or she has served time? Several studies indicate that such predictions can be made, although the accuracy is debatable. Up until the early 1980s, it was believed that these predictions were [Page 91]accurate some of the time, whereas others argued that the prediction of dangerousness was near to impossible. However, recent literature suggests that in certain situations, clinicians can indeed accurately predict dangerousness.