Appraising the risk of sexual and violent recidivism among intellectually disabled offenders
The relatively high prevalence and recidivism rates of offenders with intellectual disabilities suggest research on appraising their risk is an important priority. Although research has found good predictive accuracy of available risk assessments with intellectually disabled (ID) offenders,
we recommend several ways to improve on them: understanding the theoretical link between intellectual disability and offending may help to identify new risk items; avoiding assessments that require clinical judgment in risk appraisal; developing risk assessments using best practices; and accumulating
studies with larger samples from all intellectual disability categories for the purposes of meta-analytic research. To demonstrate an approach to reaching the latter goal, we present new analyses that show the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG) has good predictive accuracy with psychiatric
patients of lower intelligence.
Keywords: intellectual disability; risk assessment
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Department of Psychology, Westfield College, Westfield 2: Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
Publication date: 01 January 2011
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