NCJ Number
194778
Journal
Legal and Criminological Psychology Volume: 7 Issue: 1 Dated: February, 2002 Pages: 73-86
Date Published
February 2002
Length
14 pages
Annotation
The article identifies and validates general criminal thinking scales for the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS).
Abstract
The author used eight samples from existing Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) research to identify and validate general criminal thinking scales on the basis of item content. The PICTS is based upon lifestyle theory. It identifies eight thinking styles of the criminal lifestyles: mollification, cutoff, entitlement, power orientation, sentimentality, superoptimism, cognitive indolence, and discontinuity. The author developed the Current and Historical scales to hopefully provide a PICTS or PICTS-related scale that would be a consistent correlate to both past and future criminality. The scales were developed by sorting the existing 64 PICTS items into current and historical categories. The author concluded that the Current scale was a useful tool in evaluating an offender’s current general criminal thinking and may also provide insight into future criminality but the Historical scale while correlative with an offender’s past criminality is less correlative to current or future beliefs of criminality than is the Current scale. 5 tables, 23 references, appendix