An Effort to Identify Assault-Prone Offenders

Abstract

The hypothesis that assaultive offenders have a higher "access- ordering" of the primary instrument of violence, the hand, was confirmed. A modification of Wagner's projective Hand Test correctly classified over 73 per cent of a sample of assaultive offenders and matched nonassaultive offenders. When the Wagner Hand Test was used as one predictor and the So Scale of the CPI as another, all assaultive offenders were correctly identified but 27 per cent of the nonassaultive offenders were misclassified (false positives). Results of using disjunctive criteria. suggest utility of such testing procedures for selecting specific kinds of parolees (assault-prone) for specific kinds of parole programs (violence prevention) in spite of the number of false positives produced.