This is a very good book!

In graduate school with hopes of working in the field of forensic assessments;this book provided s comprehensive and I depth insight in the field of risk assessments.

This book is good, but a bit repetitive. Useful for my class though

This book divides into four sections of different sizes.The first is a short section on the development, legal and scientific, of violence risk assessment. Most of the key cases and all the main turning points are mentioned here. If you plan to practice you should still read each of the cases mentioned directly, but you'll find that the most vital points of each are included in the text.Second comes a step-by-step approach to violence risk assessment, which I found helpful and thorough. Even after doing a large number of these, I thought the Conroy/Murrie framework organized my thinking better than what I had previously been doing. Of particular benefit to me: the step on clarifying the referral question brings up several ways in which the exact statement of the question can invoke different legal standards or different scientific bases; the step on communication of violence risk includes references to some valuable research on how attorneys and judges respond to different ways of communicating risk. There are also sections on base rates, nomothetic variables of interest, idiographic factors affecting risk, and risk management (an increasingly important part of many referrals).The third section covers four special areas: serious mentally ill; sex offenders; juveniles; and death penalty defendants. Despite all my previous reading, this book brought to my attention several unique aspects of these groups that I had not previously considered. For example, I knew that death penalty defendants could be sentenced to death because they posed a risk, but I hadn't known that there was some research available on the types of factors that predict violence risk within the institution -- since there is no realistic chance of their ever leaving prison again. In particular, the authors presented ideas for assessing the risk of violence against other inmates versus against staff.Fourth there are a couple of appendices covering all the available risk assessment tools and sample reports.Overall, one of the most useful manuals I have read in a good long while.