Violent Recidivism: A Long-term Follow-Up Study of Mentally Ill Violent Offenders

Violent re-offending risk is a priority issue for clinicians within clinical and forensic psychiatry. Only few studies have compared long-term violent re-offending risk of mentally ill and their non-disordered offenders directly. Determine long-term violent re-offending risk among mentally ill treated in clinical and/or forensic psychiatry after being convicted of a violent offence (sexual and non-sexual). The re-offending risk in the treatment group was compared to the risk among "healthy" controls and less disordered nontreated violent offenders. We also examined criminogenic and clinical predictors (e.g., having a severe psychiatric diagnose). The case sample was recruited from a cohort consisting of individuals referred for a pre-trial forensic psychiatric evaluation between 1980 and 1992 (n=416). The less disordered comparison group was also recruited from this sample (n=875). The control-group was drawn from the national criminal register (n=416). Data collected from evaluation reports were linked to national registers to determine recidivism risk of subjects. The sample was followed-up for two decades. During a long-term follow-up 41% of the case sample reoffended to violence compared to 29% of the healthy control-group and 51% of the less disordered non-treated comparison group. The results showed that the best predictors were criminogenic predictors (criminal history variables). A large proportion re-offended violently. The high recidivism reflects a long follow-up time. The results suggest that violent re-offending remains a problem over a significant part of violent offender's life. The most potent predictors for the mentally ill offenders were the same predictors as those reported for non-mentally ill violent offenders. unknown unknown