Predicting violence among psychopaths no more accurate than tossing a coin

Professor Jeremy Coid, director of Forensic Psychiatry Research Unit at Queen Mary who led the research, said: “There are increasing expectations of public protection from violent behavior and psychiatrists can be seriously criticized if they make wrong decisions around the release of offenders.

“However, here we have demonstrated the difficulties of accurately predicting re-offending in certain groups. Indeed, the tools available are no more accurate than tossing a coin when it comes to psychopaths.”

Professor Coid said the results suggest it might be time to question expectations put on psychiatrists and psychologists who attempt to predict future behavior and consider what can happen to their reputations if predictions are wrong.

“The easy solution is to be highly restrictive on who is released, and be risk averse. However, even for serious offenders, most will be released at some stage and someone has to carry out a risk assessment.

“The most important future question is over risk management — i.e., what can be done to prevent further violent offending.  This area needs to be prioritized for future research. However, in the case of psychopaths, we cannot predict which ones will reoffend and we know very little about the best way to manage them in the community when released to prevent reoffending. 

”Unfortunately, this is common and 40 percent were later convicted for violence in our study.”

The study’s findings do not explain why the tools failed to predict violence in psychopaths and there could be a number of potential reasons.

Professor Coid added: “It may be that the objective measures taken into account by some tests — such as age and criminal history — vary little among psychopathic offenders and therefore can’t differentiate within this group.

“Another possible explanation is that the ability of psychopaths to lie convincingly, con, and manipulate even experienced clinicians means we need to exclude subjective clinical judgment. Whatever the reason, we need to prioritize the development of new assessment tools for these hard to predict groups.”

The study did not include life-sentence prisoners as it would not have been possible to assess them prospectively in anticipation of their release date. The generalizability of the findings is therefore restricted to similar populations. In addition to this it is possible that violence during the three-year follow-up period was underestimated as it was defined on the basis of criminal records and did not include self-reporting.

* The Prisoner Cohort Study (October 2002 to May 2006) was funded by the Ministry of Justice (formerly the Home Office). It was a large-scale study of a cohort of serious sexual and violent offenders who were about to be released from prison.

** The three assessment instruments used in the study were:

• Historical, Clinical, Risk Management-20 (HCR-20) — a 20-item checklist used to assess the risk for future violent behavior in criminal and psychiatric populations. It determines the presence or absence of each of twenty risk factors according to three levels of certainty —absent, possibly present, or definitely present.
• The Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG) – an actuarial tool for the prediction of violent re-offending.
• The Offender Group Reconviction Scale (OGRS) – a predictor of re-offending based on static risks — age, gender and criminal history.

— Read more in Jeremy W. Coid et al., “Predicting future violence among individuals with psychopathy,” British Journal of Psychiatry (26 September 2013) (doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.118471)