This article reviews the literature concerning self-injury among criminal offenders. It describes many of the problems, barriers, and obstacles to effective assessment and treatment of self-injury and discusses the absence of a clear paradigm within which to develop a classification system and standardized nomenclature to describe the spectrum of self-injurious behaviors. This article distinguishes between self-injury resulting from suicidal versus nonsuicidal intent, presents treatment strategies for managing each, and concludes with a proposed set of eight recommended goals for creating a national strategy to develop self-injury programming in correctional settings.

A training partnership was established with the Florida Department of Corrections in 2003, and over the ensuing years, art therapy graduate student interns from Florida State University's Graduate Art Therapy Program have been placed in local prisons at different times. Recently, the art therapy interns worked closely with the supervising psychologist in one prison to alleviate and redirect aggression by integrating cognitive-behavioral techniques with art therapy directives. The art therapy interns and the psychologist developed a curriculum using a combination of workbook exercises and art tasks to develop and increase the participants' anger management skills, the Art Therapy Anger Management Protocol. This article provides an overview of art therapy in prison, the cognitive-behavioral approach to anger management with prison inmates, and how art therapy was used to support this approach. Examples of completed art tasks designed to correspond with the workbook curriculum are presented. Overall, this article presents the successful collaboration between the psychologist and art therapists and demonstrates how they facilitated improvement in the participants' anger management skills through this program.

This review covers the current contributions to risk assessment. The fields of static and dynamic variables are covered for both violent and sexual offenders. The research on risk management strategies and how risk assessment is communicated to decision makers is also reviewed. Methodological considerations in risk-assessment research focus on incorporating time until failure, multiple failures, and severity of failure as outcomes. For each of the areas covered, future research directions are formulated.

The demand characteristics associated with the unique population and environment of the correctional setting dictate a distinctive approach to conducting the psychological autopsy. A review of the professional literature indicated there were no comprehensive guidelines or report formats developed for constructing the psychological autopsy in prison settings. This article proposes specific guidelines, content designations, and a structured report format to standardize the methodology for conducting the psychological autopsy. It also provides an overview of the evolution of the psychological autopsy as an investigative and forensic technique. Practical applications of the psychological autopsy in correctional settings are discussed within the context of clinical risk management programs. A conceptual model for evaluating the impact of identified risk factors on the decedent's decision-making process is proposed.