III. Mental Health Offenders

Assessment Issues:

Professional mental health clinicians use a variety of instruments to assess an offender's mental functionality. For example, some use the Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) to measure if an offender is a "psychopath." Another assessment tool is the mental status examination in which an offender is asked about all areas of his life. Many self-report inventories are used to assess problems such as depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking. There also are personality assessment inventories, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the Million Clinical Multi-axial Inventory (MCMI), which evaluate an offender's personality overall and can detect the presence of mental disorder.