Psychiatry, Dangerousness and the Repetitively Violent Offender

One of the worst fears of the American public is the fear of being assaulted and murdered by a stranger.Although most earlier studies had found that homicidal attacks by strangers comprised only about twenty percent of all murders in the United States, recent data from New York City.found that approximately one-third (419/1,592) of all homocides during 1975 were committed by strangers.'Surely one of the major factors responsible for continuing attempts to identify violent offenders who will be repetitive offenders has been the public's fear of the stranger attacking in the night.However, despite what may be a growing justification for such public fears, few leads are available for the identification, and therefore the prediction of such individuals in the research literature.State legislatures have responded to the public's fears and demands about the inability of correctional programs to identify and reduce the rate of habitually violent offenders by increasingly relying on the psychiatrist in the criminal justice process.This trend in ideology and legislation appears to be associated with an assumption widely held by the public, legislators and many criminal justice administrators, that psychiatric training and perspective make psychiatrists particularly well suited to make inputs into the estimation of which offenders are the most likely to repeat.This assumption appears closely associated with the widely held belief that there is a strong, understood relationship