Category: 2

I get many emails and phone calls from students interested in pursuing forensic psychology as a career. There is surprisingly little information available online to answer these students’ questions. So, by popular demand, I have revised my 2007 overview in order to provide more current guidance, especially tailored toward frequently-asked student questions. You may also want to review the comments sections of my original essay, which is posted at each of my two professional blogs (HERE and HERE). First off, what is a forensic psychologist? Forensic psychologists are most commonly licensed psychologists who specialize in applying psychological knowledge to legal…

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I’ve been reporting for quite some time about problems with the reliability and validity of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), a popular instrument for measuring psychopathy in forensic settings. It is a critical issue in forensic psychology, because of the massively prejudicial nature of the term “psychopath.” Once a judge or jury hears that term, pretty much everything else sounds like “blah blah blah.” Now, the journal Law and Human Behavior has published two new studies — one from the U.S. and the other from Sweden — adding to the ever-more-persuasive line of research on PCL-R rater bias. It’s high time…

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A federal judge seems willing to give the state more time. There’s scant evidence it will be used well. Guest essay by D. J. Tice, Minnesota Star Tribune* For many years, critics of the Minnesota Sex Offender Program have worried that this state may be guilty of cruel injustices. They’ve worried that Minnesota’s sweeping, inconsistent system for dumping sex offenders who have completed prison sentences into so-called “treatment centers” may be imposing retroactive life sentences on some “clients” who pose no serious threat to the public, while giving them no effective treatment. As of this summer, this is no longer…

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Dear Blog Subscribers and Readers, If you have detected a decline in blog frequency of late, it’s not your imagination. After more than seven years, I have made the difficult decision to take a sabbatical break from regular blogging in order to direct my energy toward some larger writing projects. As some of you know, in addition to juggling forensic case work, trainings and teaching with family life, I have also experienced a considerable increase in professional travel. This represents exciting professional growth for me, but I am finding that this schedule makes it hard to pursue more in-depth writing…

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Try your hand at answering these questions: When evaluating Aboriginal offenders, how valid are standard risk assessment protocols?  Among Canadian men, how well does the Danger Assessment (DA) predict domestic violence?  For sex offenders in Vermont, what instrument is more accurate than the widely used Static-99 for predicting recidivism?  In screening U.S. soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, is there a valid tool that would help allocate limited therapeutic resources in order to decrease violence risk?  Finally, what the heck are the Y-ARAT, the CuRV, the START, and the VIO-SCAN, and what (if anything) are they good for? With the frenetic…

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