Understanding the risk factors for violence and criminality in women: The concurrent validity of the PCL-R and HCR-20

This study explores the performance of 132 female maximum-security inmates on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and the HCR-20 (Historical, Clinical, and Risk Management Scheme) to examine the concordance between these two risk assessment instruments, and to assess their potential usefulness...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of law and psychiatry 2005-05, Vol.28 (3), p.269-289
Main Authors: Warren, Janet I., South, Susan C., Burnette, Mandi L., Rogers, Allison, Friend, Roxeanne, Bale, Risha, Van Patten, Isaac
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Clinical psychology
Crime - classification
Crime - statistics & numerical data
Criminal Psychology - instrumentation
Criminality
Female
Humans
Medical treatment
Offenders
Prisons
Psychiatry
Psychopathology
Regression analysis
Risk
Risk Assessment - methods
Risk Factors
Sensitivity and Specificity
United States
Violence
Violent crime
Women
Women - psychology
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Summary:This study explores the performance of 132 female maximum-security inmates on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and the HCR-20 (Historical, Clinical, and Risk Management Scheme) to examine the concordance between these two risk assessment instruments, and to assess their potential usefulness in determining level of risk for violent behavior and other forms of criminality. The two instruments demonstrated consistent and highly significant correlations across total scores, factor scores, and subscale scores. When the two instruments were entered into a multiple regression analysis to predict violent and non-violent crime, the HCR-20 did not add to the variance explained by the PCL-R. These results confirm earlier research that suggests that there is little or no difference between these two risk assessment instruments in their relationship to community or institutional violence. Further, Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analyses show that both instruments demonstrated an inverse ability to predict convictions for murder, a close to chance ability to predict violent crime, but a shared ability to predict property and minor crime. Broadly, these results suggest that psychopathic women are involved in chronic patterns of non-violent criminality, while women charged and convicted of murder generally do not have elevated scores on the PCL-R or HCR-20. The relevance of these findings to rehabilitation and treatment is discussed.
ISSN:0160-2527
1873-6386
DOI:10.1016/j.ijlp.2003.09.012