There are many practical difficulties in conducting forensic evaluations of adolescents charged with serious crimes. This paper addresses some of the reasons why adolescent forensic evaluations are problematic and suggests four strategies for establishing and maintaining rapport, based on a practitioner's experience in evaluating adolescents…

Violent individuals are a heterogeneous group, making it unrealistic to think that a single psychological profile can classify them. Adolescents (N=72) at the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry who had committed homicides were studied in an effort to distinguish clinically meaningful subtypes based on the motives and circumstance of their…

School psychologists may be asked to assess potentially violent adolescents. Research on predicting violence has demonstrated that: (1) most studies show poor predictive ability; (2) clinicians tend to overpredict violence; (3) prediction is difficult because the base rate is low; and (4) the best single predictor is past violent behavior. New…