Assessments in Forensic Practice

Assessment in Forensic Practice: A Handbook is an interesting compilation of theme-based chapters by British psychologists. It is a wonderful primer on doing criminal assessments and provides an in-depth review of many standard assessment tools, such as the Historical Clinical Risk Management-20 (HCR-20) and the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG). It also includes informative chapters concerning specific conditions, such as pyromania. The book is very good at covering large concepts that are often discussed in the psychiatric and psychological literature on criminal forensic assessment. Over the course of the book, many important areas are discussed, such as ethical concerns when doing forensic assessments, how to present opinions related to forensic assessment, and some of the inherent problems in forensic assessment, such as unknown base rates for malingering and difficulty with predicting the future.
Journal of Psychiatric Practice