Psychology 2032A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 10, 15, & Article: Criminal Law Of Canada, Involuntary Commitment, Mariticide
22 May 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 10 — Risk Assessment
•was previously seen as a dichotomy (i.e. either dangerous or not) and is now seen as a range"
•involves both a prediction component and a management component"
•prediction —> the probability that an individual will commit future criminal.violent acts,
focuses on identifying risk factors"
•management —> development of interventions to manage or reduce the likelihood of future
violence, focuses on identifying what treatments might reduce risk or what conditions need
to be implemented to manage risk"
•assessments are routinely conducted in civil and criminal contexts"
•civil contexts"
•civil commitment —> requires an individual to be hospitalized involuntarily if they have a
mental illness and pose a danger to themselves or others"
•child protection —> involves the laws that are in place to protect children from abuse, risk
of physical or sexual abuse or neglect is considered"
•immigration —> immigration laws prohibit the admission of individuals into Canada if
there are reasonable grounds for believing that they will engage in acts of violence or if
they pose a risk to the social, cultural, or economic functioning of Canadian society"
•duty to warn —> mental health professionals are expected to consider the likelihood that
their patients will act in a violent manner and to intervene to prevent such behaviour "
•criminal assessments occur at nearly every major point in the criminal justice and forensic
psychiatric systems including pretrial, sentencing, and release"
•a true positive is a correct prediction that occurs when a person who is predicted to engage
in some type of behaviour does so"
•a true negative is a correct prediction that occurs when a person who is predicted not to
engage in some type of behaviour does not"
•a false positive is an incorrect prediction that occurs when a person is predicted to engage in
some behaviour but does not"
•a false negative is n incorrect prediction that occurs when a person is predicted not to
engage in some type of behaviour but does"
•the base rate represents the percentage of people within a given population who commit a
criminal or violent act"
•it’s difficult to make accurate predictions when base rates are too high or too low"
•a low base rate leads to many false positives as many people can be incorrectly labelled as
potential reoffenders as there are not a lot of cases to base a prediction off of"
•Baxstrom and Dixon called into question the ability of mental health professionals to make
accurate predictions of violence"
•found that the base rate for violence was relatively low"
•Baxstrom’s study —> 7%"
•Dixon’s study —> 15%"
•found that the false positive rate was very high"
•Baxstrom’s study —> 86%"
•Dixon’s study —> 85%"
•indicted that in the past many mentally disordered forensic patients were needlessly kept in
restrictive institutions based on erroneous judgements of violence risk"
•Monahan and Steadman (1994) identified 3 main weaknesses of research on the prediction of
violence"
•limited number of risk factors being studied"
•how criterion variable (i.e. prediction of violence) is measured"
•how the criterion variable is defined"
•the recommended that researchers expand from classifying that participants as having
either engaged in violence or not to incorporate the severity of violence, types of violence,
targets of violence, location, and motivation"
•heuristics are short cuts people use to help make decisions but they can lead to inaccurate
decisions"
•illusory correlation is the belief that a correlation exists between 2 events that in reality are
either not correlated at all or correlated to a much lesser degree"
•unstructured clinical judgement refers to decisions characterized by a substantial amount of
professional discretion and lack of guidelines "
•mechanical prediction involves predefined rules about what risk factors to consider, how
information should be collected, and how information should be combined to make a risk
decision"
•actuarial prediction refers to decisions based on risk factors that are selected and combined
based on their empirical or statistical association with a specific outcome"
•common type of mechanical prediction"
•structured professional judgement refers to decisions that are guided by a predetermined list
of risk factors that have been selected from the research and professional literature"
•judgement of risk level is based on the evaluator’s professional judgement"
•Skeem and Monahan (2011) described violence-risk-assessment as having 4 components,
but not all risk approaches include all the components"
•identifying empirically valid risk factors"
•determining a method for measuring or scoring there risk factors"
•establishing a procedure for combining scores on risk factors"
•producing an estimate of violence risk"
•a static risk factor or historical risk factor is a risk factor that doesn’t fluctuate over time and
isn’t changed by treatment"
•a dynamic risk factor or criminogenic need is a risk factor that fluctuates over time and is
amenable to change"
•risks are now regarded as a continuous construct"
•at one end of the continuum is static risk factors"
•at the other end is acute dynamic risk factors which change rapidly and often occur just
prior to an offence (e.g. negative mood, intoxication)"
•in the middle is stable dynamic risk factors which change over long periods of time and
should be the target fro treatment (e.g. criminal attitudes, coping ability, impulse control)"
•important risk factors that are associated with future violence"
•static/historical risk factors"
•dispositional risk factors which reflect the individual’s traits, tendencies, or styles and
include demographic, attitudinal, and personality variables"
•clinical risk factors which include types and symptoms of mental disorders"
•contextual/situational risk factors which refer to aspects of the current environment"
•dispositional factors"
•demographics"
•young age is a risk factor for violence"
•the younger the person is at their first offence the greater the likelihood that person will
engage in criminal behaviour and violence"
•males are at a higher risk than females, particularly with violent and sexual offences"
•personality characteristics"
•impulsiveness, psychopathy, sexual deviance"
•psychopath is a personality disorder defined as a callous and unemotional interpersonal
style characterized by grandiosity, manipulation, lack of remorse, impulsivity, and
irresponsibility"
•deviant sexual arousal refers to showing a preference for inappropriate stimuli"
•historical factors"
•past behaviour"
•both violent and non-violent"
•offenders who have a history of break and enter offences are at an increased risk for
future violence"
