The Troubling Case of the Cannibal Cop:
Pre-crime and psychiatry often go hand in hand. Legal instruments like institutionalization and sex-offender registration all share the goal of preventing crime from taking place, and for better or worse, they’re based on a psychiatric rationale. Those opinions, however, have a fairly poor track record when it comes to forecasting future behavior. For pedophiles and other potential sex offenders, every diagnostic tool has a spotty success rate in predicting when a person might go operational with his fantasies. (With Valle, Dietz employed elements of the Static-99, one straightforward assessment geared toward predicting recidivism for rapists and child molesters, and saw no red flags.)
Still, being able to anticipate behavior remains the holy grail to some in law enforcement.
