WSU researchers have developed a new assessment tool to gauge the risk that someone with a mental illness will commit a crime. It could also speed up long-delayed competency evaluations for people awaiting trial.
The assessment provides a small but notable improvement over the current evaluation system, said Alex Kigerl, an assistant research professor in the WSU Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology.
Writing in a recent edition of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Kigerl and co-author Zachary Hamilton note a growing need to evaluate patients based on their risks to others and themselves before assigning them to inpatient hospital care or outpatient treatment.
“Often a balance must be struck between patient rights and freedoms and public safety and risk,” they write. Find the abstract for the article at Sage Journals.
State officials have struggled in recent years to ease overcrowding in mental-health facilities. They face legal action for delays in evaluating patients’ competency to stand trial. Last year, a U.S. district judge said Washington “is violating the constitutional rights of some of its most vulnerable citizens” by failing to undertake evaluations within the legal limit of seven days.
Kigerl’s new assessment aims to give mental health examiners a way to prioritize patients for quicker evaluation and help determine who should be involuntarily committed.
“If it’s looking like someone is at an exceptionally high risk of committing a violent crime, the process should be expedited for the patient to receive an evaluation and even to be hospitalized,” he said.