As Forensic Psychology continues to expand as an independent field, professionals regularly resort to psychological assessment tools to assess people involved within the justice system. The Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) is a 344-item, self-report inventory that aims to provide meaningful information for diagnosis and clinical decision-making, specifically relating to psychopathology, personality, and psychosocial environment. Its applicability in forensic settings has been increasingly recognized on account of its benefits in comparison to other self-report inventories (e.g., MMPI-2, MCMI-III), since it includes scales that are relevant to forensic settings (e.g., violence risk levels, psychopathy, substance abuse), and the existence of profile distortion indicators is useful when dealing with highly defensive and/or malingering populations. The goal of this paper is to conduct a thorough review of the PAI\'s utility in forensic settings, by focusing on the relevant forensic constructs assessed by the PAI (e.g., personality disorders, psychosis, substance abuse, aggression, recidivism risk, and response distortion), as well as its application to offender and inmate populations, intimate partner violence contexts, family law cases, and forensic professionals. Overall, the PAI continues to gather international recognition and its relevance and usefulness in forensic settings is generally accepted and acknowledged.

Adversarial hearings in hospital commitment and de novo treatment proceedings, or court hearings, delay psychiatric treatment in many jurisdictions. In Massachusetts, the \"treatment over objection\" process requires a court petition. For state hospital patients, the delay to treatment is an initial 34 day waiting period in addition to continuances of court hearings that extend treatment delays. This study examined the frequency of adverse medical events due to delayed court hearings within a forensic state hospital in the US.
The study reviewed all (n = 355) treatment petitions filed by a Massachusetts forensic hospital from 2015 and 2016. The incidence and nature of adverse events (e.g. patient/staff assaults, milieu disruptions) and acute medical symptoms (e.g. catatonia, acute psychosis), before and after the Court granted a petition for treatment, were analyzed by two raters. Adverse events included patient and staff assaults, acute psychiatric symptoms, and milieu problems.
82.6 % of treatment petitions led to involuntary treatment, 16.6 % were withdrawn by the medical petition filer, and only 0.8 % petitions were denied by the judge. Adversarial hearings occasioned an average delay of 41 days from treatment petition filing to receipt of standing treatment in addition to statute required delays. Once treatment was court-approved, all types of adverse events were significantly reduced.
Results established that the court treatment hearing scheme exacerbates health and safety risks to patients with serious mental illness. Increasing physician and court personnel awareness of these risks is likely key to enhancing a patient-focused, rights-oriented approach to these matters. This and other recommendations is proposed for jurisdictions that deal with this problem around the world.

Studies of homicide offenders that engage in repeat, non-serial homicide offending are scarce and most studies lack comprehensive criminal career data that include convictions for 1st degree murder. Drawing on archival data on 682 male convicted felons from the Florida Department of Corrections, the current study examined the prognostic association between prior 1st degree murder convictions and various specifications of subsequent homicide offending. Negative binomial and logistic regression models found that prior 1st degree murder convictions were significantly associated with current/instant homicide offending and multiple homicide offending despite controls for five forms of serious felony violence, age, and race. Suggestions for future research are proffered regarding the forensic and criminological value of 1st degree murder convictions.