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
PubMed ID
30651752
Repository Citation
Colins OF, Grisso T. (2019). The relation between mental health problems and future violence among detained male juveniles. Open Access Publications by UMMS Authors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13034-019-0264-5. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/3747
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Mental and Social Health Commons, Mental Disorders Commons, Psychiatry Commons, Psychology Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons