NCJ Number
85169
Date Published
1980
Length
31 pages
Annotation
By using expert opinion, psychological tests, demographic information, and the postconfinement history of mental patients, an actuarial approach may prove to be useful in refining clinical judgments about dangerousness.
Abstract
This study of factors bearing upon the prediction of the dangerousness of forensic mental patients in Texas is not intended to replicate what others have already accomplished in critiquing the use of dangerousness as a standard for involuntary mental hospital commitment. Studies which have examined the problem of predicting dangerousness from many dimensions have generally concluded that neither psychiatrists nor psychologists do well in making such predictions (overprediction occurs in a ratio as high as 2 to 1). Neither psychological tests, psychiatric examinations, or demographic information have proven to be of much use. The suggestion that an actuarial approach may be a fruitful way of improving judgments about dangerousness has emerged from the controversy, however. The Texas study may be the most extensive effort on a State and national scale to examine the viability of developing an actuarial approach for use in predicting dangerousness. The fundamental value of the actuarial approach is in its insistence that decision rules can be made explicit. Actuarial tables and similar devices combined with specifically identified and empirically tested clinical information and explicit consideration of particular setting and situational factors may improve predictions of dangerousness. The findings of various research studies bearing upon the causes and prediction of violence are discussed. About 80 references are listed.