Edward Patrick Mulvey

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt · Department of Psychiatry

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’...

A recent article published in the Journal of Personality Disorders (López-Romero et al., 2021) described the identification of “putative psychopathic personality” in a school cohort of 3-6-year-old children from Spain. This comment offers cautionary considerations of the original article on scientific grounds and critical comments on policy grounds...

Introduction Adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system demonstrate high rates of psychiatric disorders, suicidality, and trauma, all of which is associated with poor sleep. Poor sleep is common among adolescents and is associated with numerous adverse outcomes like inattention, school absenteeism, emotion dysregulation, and substance use,...

Although firearm violence is universally recognized as a paramount public health problem in the United States, for nearly two decades a Congressional budget amendment prevented federal agencies from funding research aimed at understanding the antecedents and consequences of gun violence. These restrictions have been lifted in recent years; however,...

We summarize current data and understanding about the prevalence of gun violence at schools and risk of rampage school shootings. Following that comes a discussion of gun availability among youth and strategies and practices in the United States and abroad that have been implemented to limit access to firearms for minors. Next, we review the curren...

The juvenile justice system is charged with the welfare of the children it serves, yet less is known about the prosocial behaviors of adolescent youthful offenders. This study identifies patterns of prosocial behavior for 7 years among serious adolescent offenders, the correlates of each pattern, and associated patterns of secure placement. Using 7...

Objectives This study aims to examine whether periods of marijuana and other illicit drug dealing (“spells” of dealing) are associated with changes in young male offenders’ gun carrying behavior. Methods This paper uses 84 months of data from a sample of 479 serious juvenile male offenders who were assessed every 6 months for 3 years and then annu...

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a communication style focused on enhancing clients’ own motivation towards change. In the justice system MI has evidence to support that it enhances communication and change behaviors in youth. As most MI training is designed for healthcare settings training and implementation of MI must be adapted to fit the juven...

Objective To examine several risk and protective factors as predictors of future gun violence among male juvenile offenders. Method Data came from a longitudinal cohort of 1,170 male juvenile offenders (42.1% Black; 34.0% Latino; 19.2% White) ages 14–19 who were adjudicated for a serious offense. Interviews were conducted with participants every 6...

Research Summary A popular explanation for mass shootings is that the assailant “must have been mentally ill.” A popular policy solution is exceptionalist—enter more gun‐disqualifying psychiatric records into the background check system to keep guns away from identified people with mental illness. We synthesized research on the connection between m...

(Reprinted with permission from Behav. Sci. Law 24: 721-730, 2006).

We examined whether childhood socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with adolescent gun violence and whether early symptoms of conduct disorder and/or exposure to delinquent peers accounted for the linkage. Participants were 503 predominately Black and White boys who were recruited in 1st grade from Pittsburgh public schools. Multi-informant as...

Gun violence takes a significant toll on adolescents in the United States, and there is a lack of longitudinal research on perceptual factors that drive gun carrying. Notably, there is no information on the relationship between perception of gun accessibility and gun carrying. Using data collected between 2000 and 2006 in the Pathways to Desistance...

The growing public health and legal concerns regarding gun violence has led to a call for research that investigates risk factors for gun violence across a variety of domains. Individual and sociocontextual risk factors have been associated with violence more broadly, and in some instances gun-carrying, however no prior research has investigated th...

The Triarchic model (Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger, 2009) posits that psychopathy consists of three elements: Boldness, Meanness, and Disinhibition. Drislane et al. (2015) recently derived scales from the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI; Andershed, Kerr, Stattin, & Levander, 2002) to assess these traits. The initial validation efforts appeare...

This study examines employment and educational outcomes for justice-involved adolescents with and without mental health disorders in the Pathways to Desistance study. We examine the patterns of education and employment and the effects of several factors, including the presence of a mental health disorder, on these positive outcomes. Three findings...

Background: Future orientation (FO), an essential construct in youth development, encompassing goals, expectations for life, and ability to plan for the future. This study uses a multidimensional measure of future orientation to assess the relationship between change in future orientation and change in substance use over time. Methods: Data were...

ObjectivesA broad research literature in criminology documents key aspects of how criminal offending develops and changes over the life span. We contribute to this literature by showcasing methods that are useful for studying medium-term patterns of subsequent criminal justice system involvement among a sample of serious adolescent offenders making...

This study identifies longitudinal patterns of institutional placement to begin to understand experiences in the juvenile justice system. We used monthly calendar data from the Pathways to Desistance study (N = 1,354), which focuses on understanding how serious adolescent offenders desist from antisocial activity. Youth between 14 and 18 years of a...

Objective Although studies have found that youth exposed to violence are more likely to carry guns than non-exposed youth, this association could be due to common causal factors or other pre-existing differences between individuals. In this study, within-individual change models were used to determine whether juvenile offenders exhibit an increased...

Adolescent gun violence is a serious public health issue that disproportionately affects young Black males. Although it has been postulated that differential exposure to childhood risk factors might account for racial differences in adolescent gun carrying, no longitudinal studies have directly examined this issue. We examined whether childhood ris...

This chapter reviews violence assessment through the lens of the practicing psychiatrist: why we care, what we look for, and how we apply the science and art of psychiatry to the assessment and management of violence risk. Assessing and managing potential violence remains an enduring aspect of psychiatric practice (American Psychiatric Association...

Juveniles who have committed sexual offenses are subject to specialized treatment and policies based on their assumed unique dangerousness, despite contradictory evidence. Limited information is available regarding risk factors and their relationships to outcomes in this population. The comparative frequency and predictive utility of empirically su...

The United States has substantially higher levels of firearm violence than most other developed countries. Firearm violence is a significant and preventable public health crisis. Mental illness is a weak risk factor for violence despite popular misconceptions reflected in the media and policy. That said, mental health professionals play a critical...

Background: Gun violence and psychological problems are often conflated in public discourse on gun safety. However, few studies have empirically assessed the effect of exposure to violence when exploring the association between gun carrying and psychological distress. Objective: To examine the potential effect of exposure to violence on the asso...

The relationship between victimization and offending has been shown consistently across different samples, settings, and crime types. This study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study to examine dual trajectories of offending between the ages of 15 and 24 in a sample of male felony offenders. The dual trajectory models demonstrate substant...

Both targeted programs and wholesale changes are sorely needed in how individuals with mental illness are processed in the criminal justice system. Mental illness is not as directly related to criminal involvement or violence as is often assumed. Mentally ill individuals are nonetheless disproportionately present in jails and prisons. Efforts to re...

Numerous factors have been posited to promote desistance from criminal offending in late adolescence and early adulthood. Research in this area has generally examined these factors for their impact on offending for a period shortly after the occurrence or shifts in possible predictors. The current study takes a slightly different approach. It exami...

Purpose: We examine whether and how much risk/need indicators change over time in a sample of serious adolescent offenders and whether changes in risk are related to self-reported and official record reports of offending in the year following assessment. Methods: Growth curve and multilevel mixed-effects models are used to examine change through...

Objectives: We observed how perceptions of risks, costs, crime rewards, and violence exposure change as individual gun-carrying behavior changes among high-risk adolescents. Methods: We analyzed a longitudinal study (2000-2010) of serious juvenile offenders in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, assessing within-perso...

The current study examined whether there is a bidirectional association between changes in alcohol use and psychopathic features during the transition into emerging adulthood. The nature of this association was investigated among a large sample of serious male adolescent offenders (N ϭ 1,170) across 7 annual assessments (ages ϳ17–23), with a focus...

This study examines the relationship between level of supervision by the juvenile probation officers (JPO) and an adolescent's offending, considering the characteristics of juvenile offenders (specifically, level of psychopathy). Data are taken from the Pathways to Desistance Study on a subset of 859 juvenile offenders. We found that the level of p...

It is known that youth engaged in the juvenile justice system show high rates of psychiatric disorders. However, little is known about the course of those disorders over time, or about mental health service use on the part of children and families during justice system involvement. Boys and girls recruited from their first contact with juvenile cou...

We examine the extent to which the relationship between mental health and substance use problems and the risk of rearrest varies across race/ethnicity. Data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders, are used to estimate the risk of rearrest over time. Results show that mental health (except for substance...

The RAGEE Group Available reporting guidelines for prognostic and diagnostic accuracy studies apply primarily to biological assessment and outcomes, overlooking behavioral issues with major public health and safety implications such as violence. The present study aimed to develop the first set of reporting guidance for predictive validity studies o...

Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement (MD) refers to the freeing of oneself from moral or ethical standards to engage in wrongdoing. Little is known about heterogeneity in MD among serious adolescent offenders, how MD changes over time in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, and how such heterogeneity corresponds to offending. We u...

Background Much of the research on specialisation in offending tends to show that offending careers are marked by more versatile than specific criminal activity. One key limitation of this research has been that very few studies have used both official records and self-reports to study the longitudinal mix of offences.AimsThis study uses longitudin...

Available reporting guidelines for prognostic and diagnostic accuracy studies apply primarily to biolog- ical assessment and outcomes, overlooking behavioral issues with major public health and safety implications such as violence. The present study aimed to develop the first set of reporting guidance for predictive validity studies of violence ris...

The concept of adolescent development has become a relevant consideration for researchers interested in juvenile delinquency. However, the integration of constructs from developmental psychology into delinquency research is still in its early stages. This article argues that it is time to move beyond description of adolescent antisocial activities...

Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder characterized by affective, interpersonal, and behavioral dimensions. Although features of psychopathy have been extended downwardly to earlier developmental periods, there is a discerning lack of studies that have focused on critically important issues such as longitudinal invariance and stability/chan...

The active involvement of parents – whether as recipients, extenders, or managers of services - during their youth’s experience with the juvenile justice system is widely assumed to be crucial. Parents and family advocacy groups note persisting concerns with the degree to which successful parental involvement is achieved. Justice system providers a...

The popularity of crisis intervention teams (CITs) for law enforcement agencies has grown dramatically over the past decade. Law enforcement agencies and advocates for individuals with mental illness view the model as a clear improvement in the way the criminal justice system handles individuals with mental illness. There is, however, only limited...

After a distinctly punitive era, a period of remarkable reform in juvenile crime regulation has begun. Practical urgency has fueled interest in both crime reduction and research on the prediction and malleability of criminal behavior. In this rapidly changing context, high-risk juveniles-the small proportion of the population where crime becomes co...

In the psychological tradition, desistance from antisocial behavior is viewed as the product of psychosocial maturation, including increases in the ability to control impulses, consider the implications of one's actions on others, delay gratification in the service of longer term goals, and resist the influences of peers. The present study investig...

To demonstrate the value of using a variable derived from qualitative analysis in subsequent quantitative analyses. Mixed methods data were combined with 10-year mortality outcomes. Participants with cancer were recruited from services at a large teaching hospital, and mortality data were from the Social Security Death Index. An observational concu...

Much criminological research has used longitudinal data to assess change in offending over time. An important feature of some data sources is that they contain cross-sections of different aged individuals followed over successive time periods, thereby potentially conflating age and time. This article compares the substantive conclusions about the r...

Objective: The authors examined the rate of mental disorders in an unselected sample of homicide defendants in a U.S. jurisdiction, seeking to identify psychiatric factors associated with offense characteristics and court outcomes. Method: Defendants charged with homicide in a U.S. urban county between 2001 and 2005 received a psychiatric evalua...

OBJECTIVE: The authors compared the predictive accuracy of two risk assessment methods that are feasible to use in routine clinical settings: brief risk assessment tools and patients' self-perceptions of risk. METHODS: In 2002-2003, clinical interviewers met with 86 high-risk inpatients with co-occurring mental and substance use disorders (excludin...

Little is known about how adolescents curtail their offending and make positive adjustments to early adulthood. The Pathways to Desistance study follows 1,354 serious adolescent offenders to provide information about these processes. This paper summarizes some initial findings from the study and lays out their potential policy implications. The fin...

Personal meaning in subjective experience is a key element in the treatment of persons with mental disorders. Open-response speech samples would appear to be suitable for studying this type of subjective experience, but there are still important challenges in using language as data. Scientific principles involved in sample size calculation, validit...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by significant interpersonal conflict, however the factors that contribute to violence among this population are not well known. Individuals with BPD and other severe mental illnesses were followed in the community for 30 weeks post-inpatient discharge. Emotion dysregulation data and detailed m...

Over the past 25 years, there have been notable advances in violence risk assessment of mentally ill individuals using actuarial methods to define high versus low risk groups. A focus on readily observable risk factors, however, has led to a relative neglect of how the offender's subjective states may be valuable to consider in research on the ongo...

Prior studies have shown a significant but modest association between mental disorders and violence and an increased risk in the presence of co-occurring substance use disorders. Categorical diagnoses, however, have limited utility when assessing dynamic risk state over time. This study used data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study to...

Perceptual deterrence has been an enduring focus of interest in criminology. Although recent research has generated important new insights about how risks, costs, and rewards of offending are perceived and internalized, there remain two specific limitations to advancing theories of deterrence: (a) the lack of panel data to show whether issues of ch...

Social scientists have long recognized that individual experiences in particular settings shape behavior, and as a result, many service sectors regularly evaluate client perceptions. This is not the case in the juvenile justice system. Using a sample of 519 serious juvenile offenders (92% male, ethnically diverse) from two sites, this study evaluat...

To investigate the relations among certain mental health problems (MHPs; affective, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], and substance use disorders), criminogenic risk, and outcomes in a sample of serious adolescent offenders. Using data from a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders (N = 949; mean age = 16 years, S...

We examined antisocial adolescents' perceptions of the importance of and their ability to accomplish positive life outcomes (e.g., employment) and avoid negative ones (e.g., arrests) during their transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Participants were 1,354 adolescents from the Pathways to Desistance project, a multisite longitudinal stud...

As a group, delinquent youth complete less education and show poor academic outcomes compared to their non-delinquent peers. To better understand pathways to school success, this study integrated individual- and neighborhood-level data to examine academic functioning among 833 White, Black, and Hispanic male juvenile offenders (age 14-17) living in...

The juvenile court was established to separate adolescent offenders from the potentially harmful effects of involvement in the adult criminal justice system. Due to glitches in this plan, there have been mechanisms for transferring particular adolescents to the adult criminal justice system and punishing them accordingly. The debate about the appro...

Individuals suffering from personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder, often evidence substantial problems in regulating and managing their emotions. The development of psychometrically sound measures that can be used in routine clinical settings to assess difficulties with emotional regulation is urgently needed. The newly...

In criminal justice as well as other areas, practitioners and/or policy makers often wish to know whether something “works” or is “effective.” Does a certain form of family therapy reduce troubled adolescents’ involvement in crime more than what would be seen if they were on probation? Does a jail diversion policy substantially increase indicators...

Extant research regarding juvenile transfer has focused primarily on the negative effects of current policies, with little consistent and rigorous work on the variation among the adolescents transferred to adult court and their later adjustment in the community. Using a sample of 193 transferred youth from Arizona, we consider how certain individua...

Prior research indicates that adolescent offenders transferred to adult court are more likely to recidivate than those retained in the juvenile system. The studies supporting this conclusion, however, are limited in addressing the issue of heterogeneity among transferred adolescents. This study estimates the effect of transfer on later crime using...

Institutional care is an enduring component of the continuum of care in the juvenile justice system, yet youth perceptions of the placement experience are often overlooked as a source of information about this practice. Little attention is paid to how institutional placements are received by youth as opposed to how they are conceived by the justice...

Because many serious adolescent offenders reduce their antisocial behavior after court involvement, understanding the patterns and mechanisms of the process of desistance from criminal activity is essential for developing effective interventions and legal policy. This study examined patterns of self-reported antisocial behavior over a 3-year period...

Little is known about the nature and prevalence of interpersonal violence among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Employing a longitudinal, multi-site sample, this study examined the degree to which BPD constitutes a risk marker for future violent behavior, and describes the characteristics of violent individuals with BPD and...

Most theorizing about desistance from antisocial behavior in late adolescence has emphasized the importance of individuals' transition into adult roles. In contrast, little research has examined how psychological development in late adolescence and early adulthood contributes desistance. The present study examined trajectories of antisocial behavio...

Once convicted, the perpetrator of serious crime embarks upon a new journey: the challenge of adjusting to long-term imprisonment. Prisoners' views of incarceration and the meaning of this experience may affect their later adjustment to life in the community. On the basis of brief narrative responses collected during an epidemiological survey of th...

The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confine...

Psychiatric symptoms play a crucial role in psychology and psychiatry. However, little is known about how dimensions of symptoms--other than symptom level--relate to psychiatric outcomes. Until recently, methods for measuring dynamic aspects of symptoms have not been available to clinicians or researchers. The authors sought to test whether systema...

The dual requirement to ensure community safety and promote a youthful offender's positive development permeates policy and frames daily practice in juvenile justice. Balancing those two demands, explain Edward Mulvey and Anne-Marie Iselin, requires justice system professionals at all levels to make extremely difficult decisions about the likely ri...

This article presents two views of the results of the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, which was conducted between 1992 and 1995 in order to ascertain the prevalence of community violence in a sample of people discharged from acute psychiatric facilities. The initial findings, which were published in 1998 in the Archives of General Psychia...

This study examined the community reentry process among 413 serious adolescent offenders released from juvenile court commitments in two metropolitan areas. Data are provided about postrelease court supervision and community-based services (CBSs) during the first 6 months in the community as well as indicators of antisocial activity, formal system...

The juvenile justice system faces a difficult challenge when providing services to serious adolescent offenders, having to balance community safety concerns with hopes for successful intervention. Increasing the effectiveness of this system rests partially on having a clearer picture of the regularities of current service provision to these adolesc...

Empirical studies of violence and mental illness have used many different methods. Current state-of-the-art methods gather information from both subject and collateral interviews as well as official records. Typically these sources are treated as additive. Any report of a violent incident from any source is treated as true and all reported incident...

The Classification of Violence Risk (COVR) is an interactive software program designed to estimate the risk that a person hospitalized for mental disorder will be violent to others. The software leads the evaluator through a chart review and a brief interview with the patient. At the end of this interview, the software generates a report that conta...