UMMS Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry

Publication Date

2019-01-12

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms | Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | Mental and Social Health | Mental Disorders | Psychiatry | Psychology | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance

Abstract

Background: Detention personnel may assume that mental health problems heighten the likelihood of future violence in detained youth. This study explored whether brief mental health screening tools are of value for alerting staff to a detained youth's potential for future violent offending.

Method: Boys (n = 1259; Mean age = 16.65) completed the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Second Version (MAYSI-2) and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) as part of a clinical protocol. Official records were collected to index past and future violent offending.

Results: A few significant positive and negative relationships between MAYSI-2 and SDQ scale scores and future violent offending were revealed, after controlling for age, past violent offending, and follow-up time. These relations were almost entirely dissimilar across the ethnic groups, even to the extent of finding opposite relations for boys in different ethnic groups.

Conclusions: The small number of relations and their small effect sizes suggest little likelihood that screening for mental health problems in boys who are detained in the Netherlands offers any potential for identifying youth at risk for committing future violent crimes. The current findings also suggest that ethnic differences in the relation between mental health problems and future criminality must be considered in future studies.

Keywords

Antisocial, Detained, Mental health, Risk assessment, Violence recidivism

Rights and Permissions

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

DOI of Published Version

10.1186/s13034-019-0264-5

Source

Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health. 2019 Jan 12;13:4. doi: 10.1186/s13034-019-0264-5. eCollection 2019. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

30651752

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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