VIOLENCE RISK ASSESSMENT
Student’s Name
Institution
This paper will focus on the article and a book summary, and the article is about Current Directions in Violence Risk Assessment by Skeem and Monahan (2011) they present a framework that goes beyond the clinical and actuarial dichotomy to describe a continuum of structured approaches to risk assessment. The book is about forensic and legal technology, chapter 15, written by Constanzo and Krauss (2012), which focuses on predicting violent behavior: the psychology of risk assessment.
According to the article, the selection of instruments used in assessing the risk of an individual should be based on the purpose of evaluation. It also suggests that in the current era, the focus should be toward predicting violence to understanding the cause of the violence and to prevent its occurrence or reoccurrence. The instruments help the clinicians to be able to analyses the likelihood that an individual will have violent behaviors. Violence risk assessment process has four components that include, “identifying empirically valid risk factors, determining a method for measuring these risk factors, establishing a procedure for combining scores on the risk factors and producing an estimate of violence risk.”
Constanzo and Krauss (2012) suggest that the main reason for trying to predict violent behavior is to enable various personnel to know the individual that may become violent hence, target interventions to help them from becoming violent. The book also illustrates the main weakness of clinical judgment being unstructured is the inability to have feedback about failure and success. The main risk factors that have been described in chapter 15 include historical makers, dynamic makers, and risk management makers. Finally, there is a need for is for forensic psychology to shift more of its attention from violence prediction to understanding the cause and preventing its occurrence and reoccurrence.
References
Constanzo, M., & Krauss, D. (2012). Forensic and legal psychology. Psychological science applied to law. New York: Worth Publishers.
Skeem, J. L., & Monahan, J. (2011). Current directions in violence risk assessment. Current Directions in Psychological Science.