Appraising the risk of sexual and violent recidivism among intellectually disabled offenders

The relatively high prevalence and recidivism rates of offenders with intellectual disabilities suggest research on appraising their risk is an important priority. Although research has found good predictive accuracy of available risk assessments with intellectually disabled (ID) offenders, we recommend several ways to improve on them: understanding the theoretical link between intellectual disability and offending may help to identify new risk items; avoiding assessments that require clinical judgment in risk appraisal; developing risk assessments using best practices; and accumulating studies with larger samples from all intellectual disability categories for the purposes of meta-analytic research. To demonstrate an approach to reaching the latter goal, we present new analyses that show the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG) has good predictive accuracy with psychiatric patients of lower intelligence.