Jl Monahan
Biographic Data
| ID | 124619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jl Monahan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jl |
| FAMILY NAME | Monahan |
| SIGNATURE | MONAHAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4431-3028 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 216 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Public opinion about judicial roles and considerations: A latent profile analysis
OBJECTIVE: To inform policies and practices that reflect the values and expectations of the communities that judges serve, we fielded a national survey of public perceptions regarding judicial roles and factors that could be considered in decision making. HYPOTHESES: We had four questions: (1) What is public opinion on the importance of various judicial roles and considerations? (2) Can distinct groups of respondents be identified on the basis of…
Pretrial Risk Assessment, Release Recommendations, and Racial Bias
We examined how the presentation of risk assessment results and the race of the person charged affected pretrial court actors’ recommendations to release a person with or without conditions. A sample of 246 pretrial court actors read vignettes that varied risk framing (success, failure), risk format (probability, frequency), risk level (low, high), and race of the person charged (Black, White). Pretrial release recommendations did not differ as a…
The Empirical Case for Pretrial Risk Assessment Instruments
Pretrial risk assessment instruments are used in many jurisdictions to inform decisions regarding pretrial release and conditions. Many are concerned that the use of pretrial risk assessment instruments may be contributing to worsened, not improved, pretrial outcomes, including increased rates of pretrial detention and exacerbated racial disparities in pretrial decisions. These concerns have led prominent organizations to reverse their position o…
Lost in translation: “Risks,” “needs,” and “evidence” in implementing the First Step Act
In this article, we focus on two highly problematic issues in the manner in which the First Step Act of 2018 is being implemented by the Bureau of Prisons: an uncritical separation of “dynamic risks” and “criminogenic needs”; and a spurious reliance on “evidence‐based” interventions to reduce recidivism risk. We argue that if the Act is to live up to its promise of being a game‐changing development in efforts to reduce crime while simultaneously …
Impact of risk assessment on judges’ fairness in sentencing relatively poor defendants
OBJECTIVE: Use of risk assessment instruments in the criminal justice system is controversial. Advocates emphasize that risk assessments are more transparent, consistent, and accurate in predicting re-offending than judicial intuition. Skeptics worry that risk assessments will increase socioeconomic disparities in incarceration. Ultimately, judges make decisions-not risk assessments. This study tests whether providing risk assessment information …
Valid or voodoo? A qualitative study of attorney perceptions of risk assessment in sentencing and plea bargaining
Prior research largely has explored judicial perceptions of risk assessment in sentencing. Little is known about how other court actors, specifically, prosecutors and defense attorneys, perceive risk assessments in the sentencing process. Here, we report a qualitative study on the use of risk assessment by prosecutors and defense attorneys in Virginia. A prior survey ( n = 70) pointed to a statistically significant difference in how prosecutors a…
Evolving Public Views On The Likelihood Of Violence From People With Mental Illness: Stigma And Its Consequences
Highly publicized acts of violence routinely spark reactions that place blame on the perpetrator's presumed mental illness. Despite solid evidence that people with mental illness are unlikely to be dangerous, such prejudice can lead to support for inappropriately using legal means to force people into treatment. We examined trends in public perceptions of violence and support for coerced treatment across a twenty-two-year period using data from t…
Risk and resources: A qualitative perspective on low‐level sentencing in Virginia
Virginia's sentencing guidelines include alternative sanctions based on the use of a quantitative instrument called the Nonviolent Risk Assessment (NVRA) that identifies individuals convicted of drug and property crimes that are considered to be at lower risk of recidivism. Although nondispositive, the NVRA affords judges the discretion to grant alternative sentences to eligible low‐risk defendants. In this study, we explore how judges make use o…
Sexual Assault Victimization and Mental Health Treatment, Suicide Attempts, and Career Outcomes Among Women in the US Army
Objectives. To examine associations of administratively recorded sexual assault victimization during military service with subsequent mental health and negative career outcomes among US Army women controlling for nonrandom victimization exposure. Methods. We used data from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers to apply propensity score methods to match all 4238 female Regular Army soldiers with administratively recorded s…
Legal Process and Social Science: United States
Violence Risk Assessment
This chapter first considers why and in what ways law is concerned with anticipating violence and how evidence in the form of violence risk assessment is legally evaluated; it then contrasts clinical and actuarial methods of risk assessment and addresses key issues and controversies pertinent to each, and surveys ways in which clinical or actuarial estimates of violence risk are best communicated to legal decision makers.
The individual risk assessment of terrorism
I attempt to identify the central conceptual and methodological challenges that must be overcome if the risk assessment of terrorism is to make the same progress that in recent years has distinguished the risk assessment of other forms of violence. Four principal conclusions are offered. First, clarity from the outset on what is being assessed—the risk of terrorism in the aggregate, or of specific types of terrorism, or of specific phases in the …
Case-Specific Sociological Inference: Metanorms for Expert Opinions
Our article critical of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (Mitchell, Monahan, and Walker 2011 [pp. 60520, this issue]) sought to engage sociologists and other social scientists on the methods and norms that should guide a social scientist who testifies as an expert witness and offers opinions that are directly linked to the specific parties in a case. Some reactions to our article proceed from mistake…
The ASA's Missed Opportunity to Promote Sound Science in Court
The American Sociological Association (ASA) filed an amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the ASA defended the testimony of the plaintiffs' sociological expert. Unfortunately, the ASA's portrayal and defense of the method and opinions of this expert do not match the actual method used, and opinions offered, by the expert in the Wal-Mart case. The authors demonstrate that none of the ASA's defenses of the expert's method has merit and that t…
The second generation of mental health courts
Mental health courts (MHCs) generally began to appear in 1997. Today, more than 80 courts exist in the United States. In the present article, the authors argue that the 2nd generation of MHCs has arrived. The authors compare 8 previously described courts (P. A. Griffin, H. J. Steadman, & J. Petrila, 2002) with 7 newer courts that have not been previously described in the psycholegal literature. The authors identify 4 dimensions distinguishing 1st…
Endorsement of personal benefit of outpatient commitment among persons with severe mental illness
This study examines whether individuals who experienced involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC) attribute benefit to this intervention. It was found that the majority of experimental subjects who underwent a period of OPC did not personally endorse OPC's benefits at the end of the study, either because they did not think it improved treatment adherence or because they rejected their own need for continued treatment. However, at the end of the stu…
Rethinking Risk Assessment: The MacArthur Study of Mental Disorder and Violence
The presumed link between mental disorder and violence has been the driving force behind mental health law and policy for centuries. Legislatures, courts, and the public have come to expect that mental health professionals will protect them from violent acts by persons with mental disorders. Yet for three decades research has shown that clinicians’ unaided assessments of “dangerousness” are barely better than chance. Rethinking Risk Assessment: T…
Psychological Science Can Improve Diagnostic Decisions
John A. Swets, Robyn M. Dawes, and John Monahan BBN Technologies (emeritus), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Radiology Department, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and School of Law, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Violence risk assessment and risk communication: The effects of using actual cases, providing instruction, and employing probability versus frequency formats
This article describes studies designed to inform policy makers and practitioners about factors influencing the validity of violence risk assessment and risk communication. Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists were shown case summaries of patients hospitalized with mental disorder and were asked to judge the likelihood that the patient would harm someone within six months after discharge from the hospital. They also judged whether the patient…
A classification tree approach to the development of actuarial violence risk assessment tools
Since the 1970s, a wide body of research has suggested that the accuracy of clinical risk assessments of violence might be increased if clinicians used actuarial tools. Despite considerable progress in recent years in the development of such tools for violence risk assessment, they remain primarily research instruments, largely ignored in daily clinical practice. We argue that because most existing actuarial tools are based on a main effects regr…
Alcohol as social lubricant: Alcohol myopia theory, social self-esteem, and social interaction
This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self-esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than…
The public's view of the competence, dangerousness, and need for legal coercion of persons with mental health problems
OBJECTIVES: The authors examined Americans' opinions about financial and treatment competence of people with mental health problems, potential for harm to self or others, and the use of legal means to force treatment. METHODS: The 1996 General Social Survey provided interview data with a nationally representative sample (n = 1444). Respondents were given a vignette based on diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, major depression, alcohol dependen…
Real in Their Consequences: A Sociological Approach to Understanding the Association between Psychotic Symptoms and Violence
Studies conducted over the past three decades have consistently reported an association between mental illness and violence. We propose a sociologically inspired explanation for this association by referring to the Thomas Theorem-if situations are defined as real, they are real in their consequences. We identify a small subset of psychotic symptoms, termed "threat/control-override" symptoms, that tend to induce violence because they influence the…
Violence by People Discharged From Acute Psychiatric Inpatient Facilities and by Others in the Same Neighborhoods
BACKGROUND: The public perception that mental disorder is strongly associated with violence drives both legal policy (eg, civil commitment) and social practice (eg, stigma) toward people with mental disorders. This study describes and characterizes the prevalence of community violence in a sample of people discharged from acute psychiatric facilities at 3 sites. At one site, a comparison group of other residents in the same neighborhoods was also…
Violent storms and violent people: How meteorology can inform risk communication in mental health law
Mental disorder and violent behavior: Perceptions and evidence
The public's view of the competence, dangerousness, and need for legal coercion of persons with mental health problems
OBJECTIVES: The authors examined Americans' opinions about financial and treatment competence of people with mental health problems, potential for harm to self or others, and the use of legal means to force treatment. METHODS: The 1996 General Social Survey provided interview data with a nationally representative sample (n = 1444). Respondents were given a vignette based on diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, major depression, alcohol dependen…
Research in community psychology: An analysis of work published in the first six years of the American Journal of Community Psychology
Real in Their Consequences: A Sociological Approach to Understanding the Association between Psychotic Symptoms and Violence
Studies conducted over the past three decades have consistently reported an association between mental illness and violence. We propose a sociologically inspired explanation for this association by referring to the Thomas Theorem-if situations are defined as real, they are real in their consequences. We identify a small subset of psychotic symptoms, termed "threat/control-override" symptoms, that tend to induce violence because they influence the…
Social Authority: Obtaining, Evaluating, and Establishing Social Science in Law
Three-quarters of a century have passed since an American court first invoked social science research to support its choice of a rule of law.' Once heretical, the belief that empirical studies can influence the content of legal doctrine is now one of the few points of general agreement among jurists. 2Yet reliance upon the social sciences, while no
The individual risk assessment of terrorism
I attempt to identify the central conceptual and methodological challenges that must be overcome if the risk assessment of terrorism is to make the same progress that in recent years has distinguished the risk assessment of other forms of violence. Four principal conclusions are offered. First, clarity from the outset on what is being assessed—the risk of terrorism in the aggregate, or of specific types of terrorism, or of specific phases in the …
Alcohol as social lubricant: Alcohol myopia theory, social self-esteem, and social interaction
This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self-esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than…
The second generation of mental health courts
Mental health courts (MHCs) generally began to appear in 1997. Today, more than 80 courts exist in the United States. In the present article, the authors argue that the 2nd generation of MHCs has arrived. The authors compare 8 previously described courts (P. A. Griffin, H. J. Steadman, & J. Petrila, 2002) with 7 newer courts that have not been previously described in the psycholegal literature. The authors identify 4 dimensions distinguishing 1st…
The ASA's Missed Opportunity to Promote Sound Science in Court
The American Sociological Association (ASA) filed an amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the ASA defended the testimony of the plaintiffs' sociological expert. Unfortunately, the ASA's portrayal and defense of the method and opinions of this expert do not match the actual method used, and opinions offered, by the expert in the Wal-Mart case. The authors demonstrate that none of the ASA's defenses of the expert's method has merit and that t…
The community psychologist as social planner: Designing Optimal Environments
The environmental movement may provide a vehicle by which community psychologists can contribute to large-scale ecological change. This paper uses one outgrowth of the environmental movement--the environmental impact assessment process--to illustrate the procedures for input by community psychologists can participate in the environmental impact assessment process to (1) predict the effects of any new project on the demand for treatment services a…
Sexual Assault Victimization and Mental Health Treatment, Suicide Attempts, and Career Outcomes Among Women in the US Army
Objectives. To examine associations of administratively recorded sexual assault victimization during military service with subsequent mental health and negative career outcomes among US Army women controlling for nonrandom victimization exposure. Methods. We used data from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers to apply propensity score methods to match all 4238 female Regular Army soldiers with administratively recorded s…
Task Force report: The macroenviroment and community mental health
Empirical Analyses of Civil Commitment: Critique and Context
Civil commitment recently has come to replace the insanity defense as the most controversial issue in mental health law. While the resident population of state mental hospitals has plummeted in the past decade, cries that commitment be abolished altogether are heard with no decrease in fervor. Many others feel that the pendulum has swung too far, that patients' rights and community care have been seized upon by fiscally conservative legislatures …
Controlling "Dangerous" People
The label "dangerous" often has been applied in America to persons whose major threat lay in the fact that they offended the moral or esthetic sensibilities of those holding power. In the America of the Revolutionary period, there was comparatively little violent crime, but by today's standards, punishments tended to be harsh and/or humil iating. The mentally aberrant were seen as especially dangerous, since their condition was traced to a devili…
Risk and resources: A qualitative perspective on low‐level sentencing in Virginia
Virginia's sentencing guidelines include alternative sanctions based on the use of a quantitative instrument called the Nonviolent Risk Assessment (NVRA) that identifies individuals convicted of drug and property crimes that are considered to be at lower risk of recidivism. Although nondispositive, the NVRA affords judges the discretion to grant alternative sentences to eligible low‐risk defendants. In this study, we explore how judges make use o…
Case-Specific Sociological Inference: Metanorms for Expert Opinions
Our article critical of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes (Mitchell, Monahan, and Walker 2011 [pp. 60520, this issue]) sought to engage sociologists and other social scientists on the methods and norms that should guide a social scientist who testifies as an expert witness and offers opinions that are directly linked to the specific parties in a case. Some reactions to our article proceed from mistake…
Endorsement of personal benefit of outpatient commitment among persons with severe mental illness
This study examines whether individuals who experienced involuntary outpatient commitment (OPC) attribute benefit to this intervention. It was found that the majority of experimental subjects who underwent a period of OPC did not personally endorse OPC's benefits at the end of the study, either because they did not think it improved treatment adherence or because they rejected their own need for continued treatment. However, at the end of the stu…
Crime and Mental Disorder: An Epidemiological Approach
The analytic framework of epidemiology can be used to study the relation between crime and mental disorder, distinguishing between the true rates of crime and mental disorder, that is, the rates at which crime and mental disorder actually occur, and their treated rates, that is, the rates at which the criminal justice and mental health systems respond to them. The conclusion that emerges is that rates of true and treated criminal behavior vary in…
Predicting Violent Behavior: An Assessment of Clinical Techniques
essential reading for those confronted with the ethical and professional dilemmas involved in predicting violent behavior. Lawyers are destined to become familiar with Monahan's book, and mental health professionals will surely want to keep a step ahead.' -- Contemporary Psychology, Vol 27 No 2 '...In summary, Monahan's book is a very readable and succinct one. Often the reader finds himself saying ...well of course, what could be more obvious? o…
Social Policy Implications of the Inability to Predict Violence
Much current social policy in the areas of mental health and criminal justice is based on the supposition that psychologists and psychiatrists can accurately predict those who will be physically violent to another. A review of the empirical literature, however, reveals that violence is vastly overpredicted, regardless of who is doing the predicting or how the predictions are made. This predictive inaccuracy has several immediate social policy imp…
The quality control of community caretakers: A study of mental health screening in a Sheriff's department
Prediction of dangerousness as a function of its perceived consequences
Effects of Self-Instruction on Rule-Breaking Behavior
Two experiments were conducted to analyze factors related to the control of motor behavior by self-instruction and to replicate O'Leary's (1968) finding on the effectiveness of self-instruction in reducing rule-breaking behavior. The length of the temporal interval between the self-instruction and the opportunity to break the rules, and the amount of prior training in self-instruction were the variables under study. The effectiveness of self-inst…
Toward undergraduate education in the interface of mental health and criminal justice
Prediction of dangerousness as a function of its perceived consequences
The community psychologist as social planner: Designing Optimal Environments
The environmental movement may provide a vehicle by which community psychologists can contribute to large-scale ecological change. This paper uses one outgrowth of the environmental movement--the environmental impact assessment process--to illustrate the procedures for input by community psychologists can participate in the environmental impact assessment process to (1) predict the effects of any new project on the demand for treatment services a…
The research adventure—Promise and problems of field work
The future of imprisonment
Social Policy Implications of the Inability to Predict Violence
Much current social policy in the areas of mental health and criminal justice is based on the supposition that psychologists and psychiatrists can accurately predict those who will be physically violent to another. A review of the empirical literature, however, reveals that violence is vastly overpredicted, regardless of who is doing the predicting or how the predictions are made. This predictive inaccuracy has several immediate social policy imp…
The quality control of community caretakers: A study of mental health screening in a Sheriff's department
Violence and Criminal Justice
Toward the safety society: Police agencies and environmental planning
Controlling "Dangerous" People
The label "dangerous" often has been applied in America to persons whose major threat lay in the fact that they offended the moral or esthetic sensibilities of those holding power. In the America of the Revolutionary period, there was comparatively little violent crime, but by today's standards, punishments tended to be harsh and/or humil iating. The mentally aberrant were seen as especially dangerous, since their condition was traced to a devili…
Empirical Analyses of Civil Commitment: Critique and Context
Civil commitment recently has come to replace the insanity defense as the most controversial issue in mental health law. While the resident population of state mental hospitals has plummeted in the past decade, cries that commitment be abolished altogether are heard with no decrease in fervor. Many others feel that the pendulum has swung too far, that patients' rights and community care have been seized upon by fiscally conservative legislatures …
Trial by data: Psychological research as legal evidence
Trial by data: Psychological research as legal evidence
Research in community psychology: An analysis of work published in the first six years of the American Journal of Community Psychology
Task Force report: The macroenviroment and community mental health
"The psychologist as expert witness": Reply to Sokal
"The psychologist as expert witness": Reply to Sokal
Predicting Violence with Statistics
Crime and Mental Disorder: An Epidemiological Approach
The analytic framework of epidemiology can be used to study the relation between crime and mental disorder, distinguishing between the true rates of crime and mental disorder, that is, the rates at which crime and mental disorder actually occur, and their treated rates, that is, the rates at which the criminal justice and mental health systems respond to them. The conclusion that emerges is that rates of true and treated criminal behavior vary in…
Predicting Violent Behavior: An Assessment of Clinical Techniques
essential reading for those confronted with the ethical and professional dilemmas involved in predicting violent behavior. Lawyers are destined to become familiar with Monahan's book, and mental health professionals will surely want to keep a step ahead.' -- Contemporary Psychology, Vol 27 No 2 '...In summary, Monahan's book is a very readable and succinct one. Often the reader finds himself saying ...well of course, what could be more obvious? o…
Social Authority: Obtaining, Evaluating, and Establishing Social Science in Law
Three-quarters of a century have passed since an American court first invoked social science research to support its choice of a rule of law.' Once heretical, the belief that empirical studies can influence the content of legal doctrine is now one of the few points of general agreement among jurists. 2Yet reliance upon the social sciences, while no
Psychologists as law professors
Psychologists as law professors
Social science research in law: A new paradigm
Psychology (51 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (26 works) · Criminology (22 works) · Medicine (21 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Psychiatry (17 works) · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Mental health (15 works)