Customer Reviews

Violent Offenders: Appraising and Managing Risk (Law and Public Policy: Psychology and the Social Sciences)

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The authors clearly know their material and. perhaps, most importantly, know how to convey this information in a clear and forthright manner. Facts and statistics saturate the content of the text, and do so in the professional style one would hope for. Historical, with expert research always evident, this is a resource which ought to be on the desks of all of those professionals who are involved with the complex and often tedious demands surrounding actuarial assessments!

This is an excellent book about the development of actuarial tools to determine risk for Violence and Sex Offender Risk. The books content covers the history of research in this area over the last 25 years and methods and measurement. The Chapter on clinical judgement is excellent and sets the stage for the need of actuarial assessments to enhance our ability to determine risk. The appendicies contain the two risk tools developed by the authors: 1) Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG, and 2) Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide (SORAG). I highly recommend this book!

As one of the other reviewers pointed out, this book contains the measurement instruments. That is not so of all the other books on the subject.

A particularly good bit of this book is where it discusses the research that showed that giving empathy training to psychopaths worsens outcomes. Some people still just don't undertand that.