Can neuropsychology inform violence risk assessment?

Much work has focused on the understanding, prediction, and management of antisocial behavior. The prediction of antisocial behavior is particularly relevant in correctional settings, where the assessment of inmates is used for classification, placement, and intervention purposes. This process has been greatly informed by violence risk assessment (VRA), which is designed to develop estimations of risk for specific antisocial behaviors and strategies to reduce this risk. Neuropsychology represents a promising theoretical and empirical basis for enhancing the predictive accuracy of VRA, and therefore its validity in clinical and legal decision making. A prospective incremental validity study was conducted to investigate the ability of neuropsychological measures to predict antisocial behavior in an incarcerated sample. Most of the screening and executive functioning measures did not demonstrate the ability to predict program failure due to major program violation; however, measures conceptualized to assess impulsivity demonstrated predictive validity for program failure, independent of the influence of substance use, and over and above a traditional risk assessment measure. Incarcerated individuals may represent a distinct neuropsychological population of interest for researchers and clinical practitioners. Future research should thus be carried out to more fully understand the relationship between executive dysfunction and antisocial behavior.