Variables affecting psychiatrists’ and teachers’ assessments of the dangerousness of mentally ill offenders

Nine high school teachers and four forensic psychiatrists rated the psychi-atric assessments, histories, and offense descriptions of 9 child molesters, 10 property offenders, and 11 serious offenders against adults. The three types of patient data were rated separately and together on the likelihood of a property offense, the likelihood of an assaultive offense, and the serious-ness of an assault should one occur, if these male patients were to be re-leased from a maximum security mental hospital. Raters also judged whether the patients should be released. There was very low interrater congruence in all ratings and in the release decisions for both occupational groups, although the correlations between the occupational group averages were very high. Ratings of the combined information were well predicted from a linear combination of the ratings of its three components for both rater groups. Psychiatric assessment data made little contribution to the appraisal of the overall file. These data question the expertise of forensic psychiatrists as well as the usefulness of psychiatric assessment data in the prediction of dangerousness. Assessment of the dangerousness of men-tally ill offenders are made by psychiatrists in order to advise the courts regarding these offenders ' dispositions and to determine when a mentally ill offender should be re-leased from a psychiatric institution. In both instances, the psychiatrist's expert opinion has a profound effect on the life of the person being assessed, particularly inasmuch as mentally ill offenders are often detained in maximum security facilities on fully indeter-minate bases. The research literature on the prediction of dangerousness suggests that these predic