A sex offender program delivered in a medium-security prison followed 109 treatment completers and 37 noncompleters for 2 years after release. Noncompleters, those who refused treatment or dropped out, had 6 times the rate of sexual and violent reoffending relative to completers. Among those who completed the program, however, positive evaluations of treatment change, such as quality of disclosure and enhanced victim empathy, found in posttreatment assessments did not correlate with recidivism. Furthermore, completers did not differ in their rates of recidivism from pretreatment rates predicted by the Static 99, an actuarial measure of anticipated sexual and violent recidivism. We conclude that the program did not influence propensities for sexual and violent recidivism but rather served as a prolonged screening instrument for sex offenders whose failure to comply with treatment attendance predicted higher rates of recidivism.

Forty male prisoners at a medium-security Canadian penitentiary completed the I Questionnaire, a measure of impulsivity, and two measures of schemas for a hostile world. Both hypervigilance for hostile words during a dichotic shadowing task and hostile attributions made about actors in social vignettes correlated greater than .30 with a criminal history of persistent violence. Impulsivity did not significantly correlate with the schema measures but correlated .30 with persistent violence. The results provide support for the Serin and Kuriychuk model of aggression that links impulsivity and hostile attributions with persistent male violence.

Fifty federally incarcerated males completed a self-report measure of impulsivity called the I Questionnaire. Offender self-schemas for a hostile world were measured with responses to questions about hypothetical social situations and with perceptions of weapons during a binocular rivalry task. Multiple regression analysis indicated that 31% of the variance in violent criminal history and 48% of the variance in psychopathy, as measured with the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, could be accounted for by combinations of impulsivity and self-schemas for a hostile world. It was concluded that persistently violent males and males with traits of psychopathy impulsively react to attributions that others are threatening them.