Understanding the risk factors for violence and criminality in women: the concurrent validity of the PCL-R and HCR-20.

This study explores the performance of 132 female maximum-security inmates on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and the HCR-20 (Historical, Clinical, and Risk Management Scheme) to examine the concordance between these two risk assessment instruments, and to assess their potential usefulness in determining level of risk for violent behavior and other forms of criminality. The two instruments demonstrated consistent and highly significant correlations across total scores, factor scores, and subscale scores. When the two instruments were entered into a multiple regression analysis to predict violent and non-violent crime, the HCR-20 did not add to the variance explained by the PCL-R.