Assessing risk in adolescent sexual offenders: recommendations for clinical practice.

Accurately predicting the likelihood that an adolescent with a sex offense history will reoffend is a precarious task that carries with it the potential for extreme consequences for the adolescent offender (e.g., lifelong public registration).

Evaluations of capacity to waive Miranda rights: a survey of practitioners' use of the Grisso instruments.

Minimal information is available regarding the frequency with which practitioners conduct evaluations of capacity to waive Miranda rights or what approaches they use in doing so. Grisso's Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights are the only published instruments designed specifically to assist practitioners in these evaluations. The instruments have been criticized for limited normative data in the test manual and the minimal guidance offered for interpreting results.

Competence-related abilities and psychiatric symptoms: an analysis of the underlying structure and correlates of the MacCAT-CA and the BPRS.

The current study used confirmatory factor analysis to examine the factor structures of two instruments commonly used in the assessment of competency to stand trial--the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool--Criminal Adjudication (MacCAT-CA) and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). Results revealed support for the three-subscale factor structure of the MacCAT-CA defined by the authors of the instrument; for a slightly altered three-factor structure defined by Zapf, Skeem, and Golding (2005, Psychological Assessment, 17, 433-445); and for the four symptom clusters of the BPRS as defined by Hedlund and Vieweg (1980, Journal of Operational Psychiatry, 11, 48-63). In addition, exploratory factor analysis of all 24 items of the BPRS revealed a five-factor structure.