We developed a set of risk ratios for the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide—Revised (VRAG-R) to broaden the range of risk communication options available when using this tool and to provide information ...needed for future efforts to apply The Council of State Governments Justice Center’s standardized five-level risk framework to the scale. A slightly reduced version of the VRAG-R normative data set was used for the analyses (N = 1,238). Contrary to previous research developing risk ratios, logistic regression provided a more accurate estimate of observed violent recidivism rates than Cox regression for both total VRAG-R scores and VRAG-R decile bins. Further analyses indicated the relationship between the VRAG-R and violent recidivism was consistent over a 15-year follow-up period. Due to the difficulties with interpreting odds ratios, the final risk ratios were computed using rate ratios derived from a logistic regression model using a 5-year fixed follow-up period. These risk ratios, and templates for how the ratios might be used in an assessment report, are presented in the appendices.
The present study sought to examine the independent and interactive contribution of negative emotionality and emotion dysregulation in predicting levels of physical aggression among violent ...offenders.
A sample of 221 male violent offenders incarcerated in Italian prisons completed self-report measures of trait emotionality, emotion dysregulation, and trait aggression. Hierarchical multiple regression and simple slopes analyses with bootstrapping were used to test the study hypotheses.
Negative emotionality was positively linked to physical aggression, whereas positive emotionality had a negative relation with physical aggression. Emotion dysregulation explained incremental variance in physical aggression, with a unique contribution of negative urgency. Negative urgency moderated the relation between negative emotionality and physical aggression, such that the positive association between negative emotionality and physical aggression was significant only at medium and high levels – but not at low levels – of negative urgency.
These findings provide empirical evidence for, and possible ground for integration of, traditional and modern theories of aggression and criminal behavior, corroborating the hypotheses of DeLisi and Vaughn's (2014) temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior. Further, these findings suggest that treatments for violent offenders should target emotion regulation skills to reduce aggressive tendencies in the presence of negative emotionality.
•Negative emotionality (NE) is positively related to physical aggression.•Emotion dysregulation explains incremental variance in aggression beyond NE.•Negative urgency made a unique contribution on physical aggression.•Negative urgency moderated the relation between NE and aggression.•NE and aggression are not significantly related at low levels of negative urgency.
Despite cultural notions that psychopathy and homicide are strongly linked, there has not been a quantitative meta-analytic review of the association between psychopathy and homicide offending. The ...current study meta-analyzed data from 29 unique samples from 22 studies that included 2603 homicide offenders, and found that the mean psychopathy score on the PCL-R for a homicide offender was 21.2 (95% CI = 18.9–23.6). This score is indicative of moderate psychopathy. The overall effect size r = 0.68 was large, and effect sizes intensified in studies of more severe manifestations of homicide including sexual homicide (r = 0.71), sadistic homicide (r = 0.78), serial homicide (r = 0.74), and multi-offender homicide (r = 0.80). Current study findings make clear that psychopathy and homicide are importantly linked and that psychopathic personality functioning is a significant risk factor for various forms of lethal violence.
Although it is well established that males engage in more crime compared with females, little is known about what accounts for the gender gap. Few studies have been aimed at empirically examining ...mediators of the gender–crime relationship in a longitudinal context. In this study, we test the hypothesis that a low resting heart rate partly mediates the relationship between gender and crime. In a sample of 894 participants, the resting heart rate at 11 years of age was examined alongside self‐reported and official conviction records for overall criminal offending, violence, serious violence, and drug‐related crime at 23 years of age. A low resting heart rate partially mediated the relationship between gender and all types of adult criminal offending, including violent and nonviolent crime. The mediation effects were significant after controlling for body mass index, race, social adversity, and activity level. Resting heart rate accounted for 5.4 percent to 17.1 percent of the gender difference in crime. This study is the first to produce results documenting that lower heart rates in males partly explain their higher levels of offending. Our findings complement traditional theoretical accounts of the gender gap and have implications for the advancement of integrative criminological theory.
Across the U.S., policy makers are enacting criminal justice reform while limiting many of those reforms to low-level, non-violent offenders. Given the power the public wields in shaping policy, it ...is necessary to consider which arguments for reform are most effective and who is viewed as most deserving of those reforms. The current study finds that varying the argument for reform, such as highlighting racial inequities, does not affect support for reform policies, regardless of the type of offender. Additionally, although respondents generally supported reform policies, results revealed significantly less support for implementing those reforms for violent offenders. Finally, findings indicate that individuals who believe violent crime is more of a Black phenomenon are less likely to support reform. These findings demonstrate that, to enact broader reform, it is necessary to address the public's preexisting opinions about crime more so than debate which rhetorical arguments should be used.
Violent extremism is commonly conditioned by a variety of psychological processes and mechanisms that when activated or deactivated aid implication in extreme behavior, including destructive actions ...with a large dose of cruelty against people and groups. One of those processes is moral disengagement, which was originally postulated by Bandura. To test this relationship, the present research focused on studying these mechanisms in members of Colombian illegal armed groups. Total sample size was 18 (14 males and four females) demobilized members of the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia AUC) and guerrilla organizations (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC, National Liberation Army ELN, among others), which had participated directly or indirectly in violent actions against people and groups, which included murders, tortures, and massacres. Qualitative methodology was used, specifically in-depth interviews and content analysis. This analysis led to the verification in the narratives of the participants of the use of all the mechanisms of moral disengagement described by Bandura aiming to justify their behavior within the armed group. The most noteworthy mechanisms were those that minimized participation (especially, attributing behavior to obeying orders: displacement of responsibility) and moral justification, especially, the context of confrontation. Moral disengagement processes are found in armed group members (such as insurgency, terrorist organizations, or militias). These mechanisms cancel ordinary psychological reactions of rejection, fear, and moral controls that oppose the carrying out of cruelty and extreme violence.
Few psychological concepts evoke simultaneously as much fascination and misunderstanding as psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. Typically, individuals with psychopathy are misconceived as ...fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous. Popular portrayals of "psychopaths" are diverse and conflicting, ranging from uncommonly impulsive and violent criminal offenders to corporate figures who callously and skillfully manuever their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder. Despite this diversity of perspectives, a single well-validated measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; 2003), has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years. The items of the PCL-R cover two basic content domains—an interpersonal-affective domain that encompasses core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness and an antisocial domain that entails disinhibition and chronic antisocial behavior. In most Western countries, the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions about criminal offenders that hinge upon issues of dangerousness and treatability. In fact, clinicians in many cases choose the PCL-R over other, purpose-built risk-assessment tools to inform their opinions about what sentence offenders should receive, whether they should be indefinitely incarcerated as a "dangerous offender" or "sexually violent predator," or whether they should be transferred from juvenile to adult court. The PCL-R has played an extraordinarily generative role in research and practice over the past three decades—so much so, that concerns have been raised that the measure has become equated in many minds with the psychopathy construct itself (Skeem & Cooke 2010a). Equating a measure with a construct may impede scientific progress because it disregards the basic principle that measures always imperfectly operationalize constructs and that our understanding of a construct is ever-evolving (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). In virtually any domain, the construct-validation process is an incremental one that entails shifts in conceptualization and measurement at successive points in the process of clarifying the nature and boundaries of a hypothetical entity. Despite the predominance of the PCL-R measurement model in recent years, vigorous scientific debates have continued regarding what psychopathy is and what it is not. Should adaptive, positive-adjustment features (on one hand) and criminal and antisocial behaviors (on the other) be considered essential features of the construct? Are anxious and emotionally reactive people that are identified as psychopaths by the PCL-R and other measures truly psychopathic? More fundamentally, is psychopathy a unitary entity (i.e., a global syndrome with a discrete underlying cause), or is it rather a configuration of several distinguishable, but intersecting trait dimensions? Although these and other controversies remain unresolved, theory and research on the PCL-R and alternative measures have begun to clarify the scope and boundaries of the psychopathy construct. In the current comprehensive review, we provide an integrative descriptive framework—the triarchic model—to help the reader make sense of differing conceptualizations. The essence of this model is that alternative perspectives on psychopathy emphasize, to varying degrees, three distinct observable (phenotypic) characteristics: boldness (or fearless dominance), meanness, and disinhibition. The triarchic framework is helpful for clarifying and reconciling seemingly disparate historical conceptions, modern operationalizations, and contemporary research programs on psychopathy. Our review addresses what psychopathy is, whether variants or subtypes exist (i.e., primary and secondary, unsuccessful and successful), the sorts of causal influences that contribute to psychopathy, how early in development psychopathy can validly be identified, and how psychopathy relates to future criminal behavior and treatment outcomes. Despite controversies and nuances inherent in each of these topics, the current state of scientific knowledge bears clear implications for public policy. Policy domains range from whether psychopathic individuals should be held responsible for their criminal actions to whether employers should screen job candidates for tendencies toward psychopathy. In many cases, the findings we review converge to challenge common assumptions that underpin modern applications of psychopathy measures and to call for cautions in their use. For example, contemporary measures of psychopathy, including the PCL-R, appear to evidence no special powers in predicting violence or other crime. Instead, they are about as predictive as purpose-built violence-risk-assessment tools, perhaps because they assess many of the same risk factors as those broader-band tools. Specifically, the PCL-R and other psychopathy measures derive most of their predictive utility from their "Factor 2" assessment of antisocial and disinhibitory tendencies; the "Factor 1" component of such measures, reflecting interpersonal and affective features more specific to psychopathy, play at best a small predictive role. Similarly, current measures of psychopathy do not appear to moderate the effects of treatment on violent and other criminal behavior. That is, an increasing number of studies suggest that psychopathic individuals are not uniquely "hopeless" cases who should be disqualified from treatment, but instead are general "high-risk" cases who need to be targeted for intensive treatment to maximize public safety. Misunderstandings about the criminal propensities and treatability of individuals achieving high scores on measures like the PCL-R have been perpetuated by professionals who interpret such high scores in a stereotypic manner, without considering nuances or issues of heterogeneity. A key message of our review is that classical psychopathy, whether measured by the PCL-R or other measures, is not monolithic; instead, it represents a constellation of multiple traits that may include, in varying degrees, the phenotypic domains of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Measures such as the PCL-R that do not directly assess features of low anxiety, fearlessness, or boldness more broadly tend to identify heterogeneous subgroups of individuals as psychopathic. As a consequence, efforts to apply one-size-fits-all public policies to psychopathic individuals may be doomed to failure. In aggregrate, these conclusions may help to shed light on what psychopathy is, and what it is not, and to guide policy interventions directed toward improved public health and public safety.
Objectives
We examine the relationship between political and religious context and juvenile court dispositions, including whether case-level indicators of focal concerns are moderated by community ...politics and religion.
Methods
Using a sample of 55,328 juvenile defendants across 175 counties in three states, we first employ multilevel modeling to estimate the direct effects of political and religious context on odds of placement. Second, we examine cross-level interactions between political and religious context, on the one hand, and major case-level predictors of placement, on the other.
Results
We found mixed support for the hypotheses. While neither political nor religious context were directly associated with odds of placement, religious context moderated several case-level effects. Specifically, findings indicated that violent offenders were punished more harshly in more religious and more religiously homogeneous counties, defendants with a prior record were punished less harshly in more religious and more religiously homogenous counties, Hispanic defendants were punished less harshly in more evangelical counties, and male defendants were punished less harshly in more religiously homogeneous counties.
Conclusion
Juvenile punishment varies across different courts and systems, yet major contextual hypotheses for this variation (e.g., minority threat) have received limited empirical support. Our findings indicate that other aspects of community context, most notably religiosity, may moderate the relationship between case-level factors and juvenile court punishment.
PDF
