Predicting batterer recidivism five years after community intervention

The purpose of this study was to examine batterer recidivism rates 5 years after community intervention and to determine differences that discriminate between recidivists and nonrecidivists. Of the 100 men included in the sample, 40% were identified as recidivists because they were either convicted of domestic assault, the subject of an order for protection, or a police suspect for domestic assault. A discriminant analysis was conducted using a variety of background and intervention variables. Five variables were selected that significantly discriminated between recidivists and nonrecidivists and correctly classified 60.6% of the cases. Men who had been abusive for a shorter duration prior to the program, court ordered to have a chemical dependency evaluation, in chemical dependency treatment, abused as children, and previously convicted for nonassault crimes were more likely to be recidivists. Variables relating to intervention did not significantly predict recidivism. Implications for community intervention programs are discussed.     

The Impact of Electoral Reform on the Public Service: The New Zealand Case

October 1996 marked the beginning of a new era in New Zealand politics, with the advent of a system of proportional representation based on the German model. This article explores the impact of electoral reform on the public service. First, it summarises the extensive public sector reforms during the mid-to-late 1980s and considers the preparations undertaken by the public service for proportional representation. Second, it outlines the concerns and expectations about the likely consequences of the new electoral system on the bureaucracy. Third, against this background, the article examines the extent to which the public service has been affected by electoral reform. It is argued that despite some notable changes to the political environment within which officials operate, the overall impact of proportional representation on the public service to date has been modest. The analysis presented here is based on a series of interviews conducted during 1997 with ministers, senior public servants, ministerial advisers and parliamentary officials, along with a range of secondary sources.     

Expert Approaches to Communicating Violence Risk

There has been virtually no empirical study of the way in which evaluating clinicians communicate their conclusions about the risk of violence toward others. Risk communication has become particularly important in recent years, serving as the link between empirical data from recent studies and the understanding and use of such data by evaluators and decision makers. The present study considered how psychologists and psychiatrists, identified as experts in violence risk assessment, responded to eight vignettes that systematically measured preferences for risk communication. The vignettes involved the presentation of the following factors in a 2 × 2 × 2 within-subjects design, counterbalanced for order: (1) risk model (prediction vs. management), (2) risk level (high vs. low risk of the individual being assessed), and (3) risk factors (the predominance of static vs. dynamic risk factors). A total of 71 individuals (41 psychologists, 2 sociologists, and 28 psychiatrists) responded to a survey mailed to 100 individuals, for a response rate of 71%. Participants were asked to rate the value of six forms of risk communication for each of the eight vignettes. There were few significant differences between the ratings assigned by psychologists and those assigned by psychiatrists. The most highly valued form of risk communication involved identifying risk factors applicable to the individual and specifying interventions to reduce risk. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance yielded a main effect for risk level and an interaction between risk level and risk factors. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Verdict selection processes in insanity cases

Judicial instructions (traditional American Law Institute vs. Guilty But Mentally Ill [GBMI]) were manipulated within an insanity defense vignette portraying a highly psychotic defendant. Construals were highly predictive of verdicts in both instructional conditions. Instead of influencing case construals, the GBMI option seems to operate by increasing respondents' decisional thresholds for insanity and guilty verdicts, creating a collapsing effect such that few such verdicts are rendered. Between-instruction comparisons reveal that the construals of respondents who choose insane and guilty verdicts are considerably more homogeneous and extreme under the GBMI conditions. Results suggest that many respondents intend their GMBI verdicts to signify diminished blame and punishment, indicating that such verdicts entail cognitive compromises that reflect both the thresholdraising effects and also probable confusion about the jurisprudential meaning of a GBMI verdict.This article is an expanded version of a paper entitled Insanity case construals are not simply verdict justification effects, which was presented at the 99th annual convention of the American Psychological Association at San Francisco, August, 1991. We would like to thank Linda Roberts, Norman Finkel, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Support for this research was provided in part by a grant from the Baldy Center on Law and Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.