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Incremental Validity of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles and Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version in Predicting Disciplinary Outcome

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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

A group of 136 male inmates housed in a medium security federal correctional institution were followed for a period of 24 months for evidence of disciplinary infractions (incident reports) after completing the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) and being scored on the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Age, prior incident reports, the PICTS General Criminal Thinking (GCT) score, and the PCL:SV total score were included in a series of negative binomial regressions and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses of three increasingly more serious outcomes: total incident reports, major incident reports, and aggressive incident reports. Results indicated that the PICTS GCT score and PCL:SV total score were incrementally valid predictors of all three outcomes, with the strongest effects occurring when more severe incident reports were predicted. On the other hand, only the PICTS GCT score and Proactive Criminal Thinking (P) scale produced more than one significant ROC finding.

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Notes

  1. The expectation was that an inmate would complete the PICTS because it was part of the routine intake procedure adopted by the Psychology Services department for all incoming inmates. The two inmates who refused to be tested could have been cited for refusal to accept programming because Bureau of Prisons policy requires that a psychological intake be completed on all incoming inmates, an intake which in this particular institution included the PICTS.

  2. This is a highly reliable system with several checks and balances, including the fact that it is subjected to annual review by the correctional programs and disciplinary hearing branches of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Only incident reports for which an inmate is found guilty (approximately 95% of all disciplinary reports that are heard) are catalogued in this system. Incident reports for which an inmate is found not guilty are purged from the system and all paperwork relating to the report is destroyed.

  3. Number of prior arrests was also used as an index of prior criminality but it failed to correlate significantly with any of the outcome measures (IR-T, r=−.04; IR-M, r=−.05; IR-A, r=−.04) and it failed to alter the outcome of the negative binomial regressions except to make the t-test results for the other covariates stronger than the figures reported in Table 2.

  4. When this one outlying participant was removed from the analyses the following results occurred: age (β=−.065, SE=.019, t=−3.46, p<.001), prior incident reports (β=.236, SE=.096, t=2.46, p<.05), and the PICTS GCT (β=.010, SE=.005, t=2.07, p<.05) but not the PCL:SV total score (β=.049, SE=.031, t=1.58, p>.10) significantly predicted IR-T; age (β=−.083, SE=.027, t=−3.08, p<.01), the PCL:SV total score (β=.091, SE=.039, t=2.31, p< .05), and the PICTS GCT (β=.013, SE=.006, t=2.06, p<.05) but not prior incident reports (β=.062, SE=.103, t=0.60, p>.10) significantly predicted IR-M; the PICTS GCT (β=.027, SE=.010, t=2.75, p<.01) but not age (β=−.064, SE=.038, t=−1.69, p=.09), prior incident reports (β=.101, SE=.133, t=0.76, p>.10), or the PCL:SV (β=.109, SE=.059, t=1.80, p=.07) significantly predicted IR-A.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, Minersville, PA, 17954, USA

    Glenn D. Walters

  2. Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Wanda Mandell

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  1. Glenn D. Walters
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  2. Wanda Mandell
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Correspondence to Glenn D. Walters.

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Walters, G.D., Mandell, W. Incremental Validity of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles and Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version in Predicting Disciplinary Outcome. Law Hum Behav 31, 141–157 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9051-y

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