David S DeMatteo

Forensic mental health professionals may become involved in the discovery process through their role as an expert witness or consultant. Common discovery mechanisms that forensic mental health professionals should be prepared for include document production, subpoenas, interrogatories, and depositions. This chapter discusses federal discovery laws and best practices for forensic mental health professionals who are preparing for a deposition or responding to a subpoena. This chapter also reviews common mistakes that forensic mental health professionals make and provides concrete proactive steps that can be taken to avoid them. Common ethical issues that arise during the discovery process, including confidentiality and disclosure of testing materials, are also reviewed.

The notion that substance use increases a person’s risk of future criminality or violence is reflected nearly uniformly across risk assessment instruments. Most of these risk assessment instruments, however, treat substance use as a general class. Closer inspection reveals that this approach is problematic because not all substances have an equally strong relationship to crime/violence. In particular, cannabis, opioids, and hallucinogens appear to warrant different treatment. This chapter proposes rethinking the way evaluators approach substance use in risk assessment contexts to reflect the current state of research on the relationship between substance use and crime/violence. After reviewing the literature on this topic and contemporary approaches to risk assessment, we propose a three-step framework that will enable clinicians to integrate a greater degree of nuance into their risk assessments, regardless of the specific risk assessment instruments used. We demonstrate potential applications of this framework and suggestions for communicating results through the use of vignettes.

Violence and recidivism risk assessment are key components of sentencing for juvenile homicide offenders. Juveniles convicted of homicide face lengthy incarceration up to and including life without possibility of parole. However, sentencing necessarily entails individualized consideration of the juvenile being sentenced to determine, among other things, current and future level of risk posed to the community, examined in the context of desistance. Although the field of violence risk assessment has made great strides in recent decades - particularly via utilization of risk prediction and reduction frameworks such as the Risk-Need-Responsivity model - numerous limitations exist when attempting to predict long-term risk of juvenile offenders. Accordingly, this chapter explores best practices for risk assessment of juveniles; highlights several limitations to the field's ability to predict long-term risk for juveniles, particularly relevant for the context of juvenile homicide offenders; and discusses a research-informed framework for assessing long-term risk in this population.

Rates of mental illness among jailed individuals are considerably higher than rates of mental illness in the general community population, so the provision of mental health services in jails is receiving increasing attention from clinicians, researchers, correctional institutions, and policymakers. This chapter focuses on several important legal and ethical considerations that are implicated when providing mental health services—screening, assessment, and intervention—to those in jail. After describing the overrepresentation of mental illness among jailed individuals, this chapter discusses ethical considerations relating to mental health screening, confidentiality, solitary confinement, and research conducted in jail contexts. Next, this chapter discusses practical considerations relevant to the provision of mental health services in jails, including the legal standard for mental health care in jails and a variety of organizational standards and guidelines. This chapter concludes with a discussion of best practices for providing mental health services in jails.

This chapter reviews the context, history, and development of problem-solving courts. We describe common components, the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model and clinical interventions, the range of courts and their unique focus, along with the strengths and limitations of the problem-solving court model. We then review the research base for key types of problem-solving courts (e.g., drug courts and mental health courts), with a focus on meta-analytic research whenever possible and a discussion of methodological challenges and limitations of the literature. The chapter also highlights the ethical and legal considerations for problem-solving courts and outlines areas for future research and development.

This chapter reviews the extant literature to identify empirically proven strategies that pre-arrest diversion (PAD) programs could employ to improve outcomes. PAD programs generally refer low-risk individuals who use drugs to community-based services and rehabilitation in lieu of formal entry into the criminal justice system. Preliminary data indicate that these programs can reduce incarceration rates, recidivism, and drug use, and that they result in cost savings relative to standard engagement in the criminal justice system. Although the early verdict is that these programs reduce public harm, existing programs often use arbitrary criteria for determining eligibility, making evaluation and replication unreliable. PAD programs may serve to improve both public health and public safety by utilizing empirically proven practices. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges to the development, implementation, and operations of PAD programs. Although preliminary data from these programs support their utility, continued research is necessary to identify what practices facilitate their short- and long-term success.

Capital sentencing is the legal process by which homicide offenders are determined to be deserving either of a sentence of life imprisonment or a sentence of death. Due to the severe and irrevocable liberty deprivation that a death sentence represents, the US Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to ensure that death sentences are not levied in arbitrary and capricious fashion. In addition, they have restricted the classes of individuals the death penalty can apply to. This chapter reviews key Supreme Court case law pertaining to capital sentencing as well as highlights several vital factors for forensic mental health professionals to consider in conducting evaluations in accordance with the trial phase of capital sentencing proceedings. Said factors include assessment of mitigating factors for sentencing, assessment of intellectual disability in Atkins evaluations, and assessment of future dangerousness.

Crime and aggression are among the strongest and most stable concerns of citizens and policy makers. Similar to the research examining life‐influenced desistance from crime, studies on intervention programs aimed to reduce criminal activity have generally focused on juvenile or young adult offenders. This chapter provides a review and analysis to two kinds of desistance from criminal offending: intervention‐influenced and life‐influenced (without intervention). It focuses on the role and impact of protective factors vis‐à‐vis desistance from criminal behavior. The chapter addresses the subgroups for which there is good evidence, including the question of gender. It considers protective factors and their psychometric properties. The chapter includes a discussion of the evidence relevant the measures and tools that are helpful in making decisions about desistance through both intervention‐influenced and life‐influenced risk reduction. Finally, it provides a critical analysis of the most appropriate assessment practices, and discuss what is ethically sound and empirically supported.