Integrating risk and dangerousness in specific legal contexts: Clarifying concepts and justifying interventions.

Several legal interventions under the police power and parens patriae functions of the state depend partially on judgments that an individual is dangerous. Psychological research regarding risk assessment can provide relevant evidence regarding the appropriate application of these interventions. Developing, interpreting, and presenting relevant research regarding risk assessment in a manner that enhances the ability of courts to make accurate determinations of dangerousness requires clarification of the risk presented by this individual and explanation of how this person generates this risk. Testimony regarding such research can enhance the ability of the courts to make accurate judgments regarding the relationship between the risk presented and the justification for the specific intervention at issue. This article examines the justificatory functions of judgments of dangerousness for various police power and parens patriae interventions in order to clarify the manner in which psychological research and testimony can contribute to the ability of the courts to accurately assess the risk presented by an individual in making a judgment of dangerousness for a specific form of legal intervention.

Duties of the Psychiatric Committee for Preventive Measures. Present situation and proposed normative changes / Zadania Komisji Psychiatrycznej do Spraw Srodków Zabezpieczajacych. Stan obecny i postulaty zmian normatywnych.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the present legal model of the Psychiatric Committee for Preventive Measures and formulate proposed changes in regulations based on research findings. In 2003 the legislator delegated the qualifying procedures to the Committee, which resulted in lengthening the time until the moment of detaining the convict in a closed facility, which may cause harm to both the convict and the society. It is proposed that the classification be performed by experts, who must be heard by the court anyway before preventive measures are decreed, with the possibility of consulting the Committee in difficult or doubtful cases, if needed. Most tasks of the Committee, however, should be related to exercising control and to do this, it is necessary for the Committee to liaise with the court's penitentiary supervisors.

The role of forensic psychiatry in mental health systems in Europe.

BACKGROUND: Forensic psychiatry at first glance seems to differ from one country to another due to different historical developments, different legal systems and different mental health systems. In spite of that, forensic psychiatry has several goals shared across countries, principally: assurance of treatment for severely mentally ill people who become delinquent; giving evidence to courts in cases when the offender's mental responsibility is in question; working effectively at the interface of the law and psychiatry, and, in so doing, working well with other clinical and non-clinical professionals in the field; preventing relapse of offenders with mental disorder. In order to achieve these goals, special knowledge and skills must be developed, especially in assessment and management of violence and sexual deviance and of the risk of these behaviours, incorporating techniques developed in neighbouring disciplines. One of the greatest challenges in the development of forensic psychiatry lies in its relationship with general psychiatry. It is arguable that the specialization of psychiatry into sub-specialties has lead to loss of some skills in general psychiatry and to a 'forensification' of people who would previously have been treated as general psychiatry patients. AIMS: In partnership, however, general and forensic psychiatrists could potentially achieve more than either group on its own: they could better prevent people with mental illness from becoming offenders; prevent people with mental illness from becoming victims of crime; intervene in the vicious circle from victim to perpetrator; assess young people at risk for antisocial behaviour and protect them from becoming criminals. Clinical research on these topics is just beginning and this article argues for a close integration of forensic psychiatry into the wider mental health system and for a more intensive exchange of knowledge and skills from forensic psychiatry to general psychiatry and vice versa.

[Forensic psychiatry]. / Forensische Psychiatrie.

Forensic psychiatry is an important part of psychiatry which is especially in public view. This paper summarizes the judicial framework and basic principles in testimony concerning criminal responsibility and criminal prognosis. An interdisciplinary work group has established minimal standards for both these topics, which are also described. They comprise a good example in psychiatry and law for developing quality assurance in this important field.

An evaluation of nonassaultive, assaultive, and sexually assaultive adolescents at pretrial sentencing: a comparison on cognition, personality, aggression, and criminal sentiments.

This study evaluated male adolescents who were convicted of offenses. Test scores of 12 nonassaultive, 14 assaultive, and 13 sexual offenders were compared prior to sentencing. A battery of psychometric tests evaluating cognition, scholastic ability, personality, aggression, and criminal sentiments were administered. Significant differences were noted for the subtest Block Design of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. Significant personality measures were also noted for Social Introversion and Addiction Acknowledgement of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent Form, and the Inhibited, Sexual Discomfort, Peer Insecurity, Substance Abuse Proneness, and Anxious Feelings of the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory. There were significant differences noted for the State Anger, Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally, Feel Like Expressing Anger Physically, Trait Anger, Angry Temperament, Angry Reaction, Anger Expression-Out, and Anger Expression Index of the Spielberger State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. Discriminant analyses showed the three groups could be separated by stepwise procedure.

[Mental state and the criminal responsibility--legal regulations and medical criteria in Poland and other countries]. / Stan psychiczny a odpowiedzialnosc karna--regulacje prawne i kryteria medyczne w Polsce oraz innych panstwach.

In contemporary civilized legal systems, sanity is a prerequisite for criminal responsibility of the perpetrator. Thus, insanity resulting from certain psychiatric and psychological disorders is a circumstance excluding the guilt. General assumptions of insanity criteria are close and similar in legal systems of the majority of countries; however, certain essential differences appear in details of their interpretation and acceptance. These differences in particular appear among systems of continental European states as opposed to these, in which the judiciary system is derived from the English law. The paper presents and discusses in detail the legal and medical considerations of insanity defense in Poland, as well as outlines the legal foundations of this issue in other countries of Europe, North America and Australia.

A legal analysis of Australian criminal cases involving defendants with autism spectrum disorder charged with online sexual offending.

This paper examines how the symptomology of the small number of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) charged with online sexual offenses in Australia is established during legal arguments and conceived by the judiciary to impact legal liability and offending behavior. This study aims to provide empirical support for the proposition that judicial discourses regarding the connection between ASD and online sexual offending, including conduct related to child exploitation material (CEM), have little bearing on overall questions of criminal liability or the use of alternative penal dispositions. It does so by exploring a sample of nine recent Australian criminal cases, involving ten rulings, that examine how evidence of ASD is raised in legal arguments in ways that suggest a diagnosed condition may have contributed significantly to the alleged wrongdoing. We conclude by suggesting current Australian judicial practice requires more sensitivity to the impact of clinical factors associated with ASD in shaping alternative supervisory and non-custodial dispositions for individuals convicted of online sexual offenses.

Without thinking: impulsive aggression and criminal responsibility.

In the U.S. the decision to impose criminal responsibility rests on an assumption about the defendant's decision to engage in proscribed conduct. We punish only those who we believe had the capacity to make a choice. In an increasingly violent world, the criminal law and the assumptions upon which it rests are relentlessly tested. A new generation of neuro-imaging technologies offers to provide insights into structural and functional abnormalities in the brain that may limit the autonomy of many dangerous offenders and unravel the fabric of the criminal justice system. How will the results of these technologies be received by the courts--are they relevant to existing formulations of the prima facie case, the insanity defense, or mitigation of sentence; will changes in the science or the law be required to accommodate this knowledge? The new generation of technologies may appropriately play a role in assessing culpable mental states only if they are also reliable. This short article takes on these and a host of other related questions at the intersection between science, law, and science fiction.

The problem with Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist: incorrect conclusions, high risk of misuse, and lack of reliability.

In this article the reliability and usefulness of Hare's Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) and the conclusions on basis of the scores are examined. It was concluded that, a) this checklist is a not a reliable tool, b) the conclusions that are linked to these PCL-R scores with regard to the treatability of psychopaths are incorrect, harmful and unethical, c) can easily be misused in legal systems and forensic psychiatric settings to dispose of problematic psychopaths, and d) the diagnostic category psychopathy should be rejected firmly because some items are subjective, vague, judgmental and practically unmeasurable, and the term psychopathy itself seems to be judgmental. Suggestions are made in order to prevent misuse of such assessment and prediction tools.

[Criminal irresponsibility of mentally-disordered patients: current data and debate issues]. / L'irresponsabilité pénale des malades mentaux: données actuelles et enjeux du débat.

Adopted by the French Parliament on February 25th 2008, law No 2008-174 about safety detention and declaration of penal irresponsibility on account of mental trouble has changed the process of declaration of irresponsibility on account of mental trouble. The law notably provides for the institution of a public and contradictory hearing, so that the victim can know what really happened, can debate about it, listen to the witnesses, the experts, the different sides, the barristers and the Director of Public Prosecutions. To be found in the law is a list of measures which can be taken by the penal courts on the occasion of a declaration of irresponsibility on account of mental trouble. Rather than stating the practical applications, partially contained in decree No 2008-361 (April 16th 2008), we offer the readers of this clarification to bring up again the foundations of that penal responsibility in France. The objective here is to understand what is at stake in the debate which for many months has opposed the different protagonists: psychiatrists, experts or not, magistrates, and plaintiff claiming damages.

Response to Disclosure as an Indicator of Competence to Stand Trial.

Ethics guidelines recommend that forensic mental health professionals begin in-person assessments by explaining the nature and purpose of the examination. To learn whether evaluees have understood and can give consent, forensic practitioners may ask evaluees to paraphrase the explanation. This article explores how a forensic evaluee's disclosure response (DR) reveals substantive information relevant to the purposes of a forensic examination. We examined archival data from 255 reports on competence to stand trial (CST) that a Midwest public sector hospital had previously submitted to courts. We classified each evaluee's DR at one of three levels: DR = yes (accurate paraphrasing), DR = no (inability to paraphrase or provide a relevant response), or DR = other (an intermediate level implying a less-than-accurate response). None of the 28 DR = no evaluees was CST, and only 7 (17%) of the 48 DR = other evaluees were CST. Thus, a CST evaluee who cannot paraphrase an examiner's explanation is likely to be incompetent to stand trial, and an examiner would need to adduce a strong argument to support any opinion to the contrary.

Psychopathy in adolescence and criminal recidivism in young adulthood: longitudinal results from a multiethnic sample of youthful offenders.

Very few studies to date have examined the long-term predictive validity of psychopathy among juveniles. The current study reports general and violent recidivism data for an ethnically heterogeneous sample of male offenders (n = 75) who had been administered the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL: YV) in 1996 when they were on average 16 years of age. Neither total scores nor factor scores of the PCL: YV predicted general or violent reconvictions throughout this time frame. These modest effects underscore recent concerns raised about the utility of psychopathy as a risk factor for future criminality, particularly among multiethnic offender samples.

Predicting restorability of incompetent criminal defendants.

U.S. courts frequently require forensic examiners to offer opinions concerning the likelihood that criminal defendants found incompetent to stand trial can have their competence "restored" through treatment. Yet no jurisdiction has established legal guidelines for testimony concerning restorability, and several authors have suggested that mental health professionals cannot accurately predict whether treatment to restore competence will succeed. This study asked whether reliable information that is consistently available at the time of examination might support empirically grounded opinions about the likelihood of restoration. Using records from all 351 inpatient pretrial defendants who underwent competence restoration at a state psychiatric hospital from 1995 through 1999, I evaluated whether several types of information that are reliable and that could consistently be made available to forensic examiners--including evaluees' demographic characteristics, diagnoses, symptom patterns, criminal charges, number of prior public sector hospitalizations, and cumulative prior length of stay (LOS)--would predict outcome of restoration efforts. I modeled the probability of successful restoration using logistic regression equations, and evaluated the equations' predictive accuracy using k-fold cross-validation and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Lower probability of restoration was associated with having a misdemeanor charge, longer cumulative LOS, older age, and diagnoses of mental retardation, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder. Although the overall rate of successful restoration for felony defendants was 75 percent, logistic equations allowed selection of subgroups with high predicted probabilities of restoration (>90%) and low probabilities of restoration (<35%). In cross-validation simulations, predictive equations had ROC areas of 0.727 for all defendants, and 0.735 for felony defendants. These findings provide scientific support for testimony that two types of incompetent evaluees have well-below-average probabilities of being restored: chronically psychotic defendants with histories of lengthy inpatient hospitalizations and defendants whose incompetence stems from irremediable cognitive disorders (such as mental retardation). Nonetheless, courts may still deem low probabilities of success to be "substantial" enough to warrant attempts at restoration.

The psychiatric defence and international criminal law.

Following the development of the International Criminal Court (ICC) the mental state of the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes will become a more important issue in regard to defence and mitigating factors. This article examines how the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in particular has dealt with the mental illness defence to date, and how its judgements can serve as guidance for the ICC as it becomes the major international court of the future. The absence of a mental health defence in the Statutes of the ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has led to a reliance on the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the two tribunals. There are major difficulties in using the mental health defence as it is defined in the Statutes of the ICC because of a requirement for the destruction of mental capacity as a valid defence. Fitness to plead and the defence of intoxication are also examined.

Evaluating science outside the trial box: applying Daubert to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines' criminal history score.

A limited amount of research exists examining the ability of the Criminal History Score of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (Guidelines) to achieve one of its most essential objectives: prediction of recidivism. Building on the work of Schopp [Schopp, R. (2001). Competency, condemnation, and commitment: An integrated theory of mental health law. Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association], it is suggested that the scientific admissibility framework and the underlying principles announced by the United States Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical [Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., 507 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786 (1993)] should be expanded beyond the constraints of the evidentiary admissibility phase of trial and should apply to legislative and administrative rules that have: a) an empirically testable purpose and b) a substantial impact on the rights of individuals. Such an analysis offers a useful mechanism for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of social science being used by legal institutions. Based upon a hypothetical Daubert analysis, the scientific validity of the Guidelines' Criminal History Score is assessed and demonstrated to be insufficient. The law and policy implications of this finding are discussed.

Use of the psychological inventory of criminal thinking styles to predict disciplinary adjustment in male inmate program participants.

The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) was administered to program participants in two different federal prisons-a medium-security federal correctional institution and a maximum-security penitentiary-who were subsequently followed for a period of 24 months for evidence of disciplinary adjustment problems. Disciplinary outcome was measured by the total number of incident reports, the number of nonaggressive incident reports, and the number of aggressive incident reports received during the 24-month follow-up. Negative binomial regression was used to test the relationship between the eight PICTS thinking style scales and three disciplinary outcome measures because the total and nonaggressive disciplinary report distributions showed signs of overdispersion. The only PICTS thinking style scale to achieve statistical significance in this study was the Cutoff scale that successfully predicted total, nonaggressive, and aggressive incident reports in both samples.

[Security measures in the penal code, in the opinions of expert psychiatrists and some problems in their applications]. / Srodki zabezpieczajace w kodeksie karnym i w opiniach bieglych psychiatrów oraz niektóre problemy z ich stosowaniem.

The aim of this paper is to remind expert psychiatrists, the three basic elements required for the application of security measures such as placing the convict in a psychiatric hospital. They are: 1) An act was of serious social damage, 2) the damage was committed in a state of non-liability, 3) there is a high risk of the person repeating the act of similar social damage. The fulfilment of these three is an obligation for the court to apply the security measure of placing the person in a psychiatric hospital (art. 94 section 1 of the penal code). Practice shows that experts have difficulties in these evaluations, which in turn results in faults in directing for placement withoutjust cause, or in turn-there is no directing, even though there are causes for it. There is a huge need for legal regulations on these manners, after the forensic psychiatric observation ends. The non-liable delinquent who committed an act of serious social damage is in risk of committing this act once more, whilst he is not in custody. The issue is in showing a legal basis for keeping the non-liable delinquent from such an act in a psychiatric hospital, in spite of ending the observation, until the legal sentence on the security measure is in place.

Effectiveness of a self-administered intervention for criminal thinking: Taking a Chance on Change.

The current study tested the effectiveness of a self-administered, cognitive-behavioral intervention targeting criminal thinking for inmates in segregated housing: Taking a Chance on Change (TCC). Participants included 273 inmates in segregated housing at state correctional institutions. Reductions in criminal thinking, as assessed by the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Styles-Simplified Version, were found in the general criminal thinking score as well as the proactive and reactive composite scores. Examination of demographic predictors of change (i.e., age, years of education, length of sentence) revealed older and more educated participants decreased in criminal thinking more than younger and less educated participants. For a subset of 48 inmates, completion of TCC was associated with significant reduction of disciplinary infractions. Reductions in reactive criminal thinking predicted reductions in disciplinary infractions. Although further research is needed to determine the effectiveness of TCC in reducing recidivism, the reductions in criminal thinking and disordered conduct suggest this is a promising intervention and mode of treatment delivery. By utilizing self-directed study at an accessible reading level, the intervention is uniquely suited to a correctional setting where staff and monetary resources are limited and security and operational issues limit the feasibility of traditional cognitive-behavioral group treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Gendered violence and restorative justice: the views of victim advocates.

The use of restorative justice for gendered violence has been debated in the feminist literature for some time. Critics warn that it is inappropriate because the process and outcomes are not sufficiently formal or stringent, and victims may be revictimized. Proponents assert that a restorative justice process may be better for victims than court because it holds offenders accountable and gives victims greater voice. This article presents what victim advocates in two Australian states think about using restorative justice for gendered violence. We find that although victim advocates have concerns and reservations about restorative justice, most saw positive elements.