Background Changes in mental health service provision in most western countries have been associated with an increasing role of the police in the community management of people with mental health problems, but little is known about how the police perceive this in the UK.Objectives To investigate police officers’ views on their roles in dealings with people with mental health problems and with mental health services.Methods Nine in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with front line police officers. These interviews were analysed for recurrent themes using interpretative phenomenological analysis.Results …

Background There is worldwide evidence of high rates of mental disorder among prisoners, with significant co-morbidity. In England and Wales, mental health services have been introduced from the National Health Service to meet the need, but prison health-care wings have hardly been evaluated.Aims/hypotheses To conduct a service evaluation of the health-care wing of a busy London remand (pre-trial) prison and examine the prevalence and range of mental health problems, including previously unrecognised psychosis.Methods Service-use data were collected from prison medical records over a 20-week period in 2006-2007, …

Background There is a need for research to promote an understanding among service developers on why people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are referred to offender services in order for them to receive appropriate assessment and treatment. Previous studies investigating referrals into forensic ID services have concentrated on referral sources and administrative variables such as legal status.Aims To construct a predictive model for choice of service referral based on a comprehensive range of information about the clientele.Method We conducted a case record study of 336 people referred to …

Background There has been a lot of research on risk factors for recidivism among juvenile offenders, in general, and on individual risk factors, but less focus on subgroups of serious juvenile offenders and prediction of recidivism within these.Objective To find an optimal classification of risk items and to test the predictive value of the resultant factors with respect to severity of recidivism among serious juvenile offenders.Method Seventy static and dynamic risk factors in 1154 juvenile offenders were registered with the Juvenile Forensic Profile. Recidivism data were collected …

Background Few studies have explored protective factors in the assessment of risk, despite acknowledgement that protective factors may play an important role.Aim To examine the significance of protective factors in assessment of risk using the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY).Method The SAVRY was completed on 135 male adolescents in custody in the UK. Data on previous offending and childhood psychopathology were collected. Participants were prospectively followed up at 12 months using data from the Home Office Police National Computer (HOPNC).Results Participants with protective …

No abstract.

The judge or jury makes a subjective determination of when an expert is credible. However, no published measure exists for assessment of the credibility of expert witnesses. The current study addressed this gap by developing and cross-validating the Witness Credibility Scale (WCS). Drawing on the narrative literature, we hypothesized that credibility was a product of four factors: "likeability," "believability," "trustworthiness," and "intelligence." A 41-item measure was initially constructed based on successive iterations of ratings by a panel of judges using items from the Osgood Semantic Differential measure and was subsequently …

In-flight medical events are in an area of medicine that is often overlooked but occurring more and
more. (Source: Medical Economics – Malpractice)

This study focuses on victim-offender dialogue files archived by Ohio’s Office of Victim Services (OVS). The OVS director was interested in knowing why only one in four initiated dialogue files complete actual face-to-face dialogue. Victim offender dialogue programs based on restorative justice theory have been shown to increase victim and offender satisfaction, decrease offender recidivism, and increase the rate of restitution. An archived data analysis on a sample (N = 212) of OVS completed and will-not-proceed files revealed offender race did not have a significant effect on dialogue completion rate. …