A Recidivism Prediction Study of the MMPI/MMPI-2 Scores of Catholic Clergy Sex Offenders: Identifying Personality-Based Risk Markers

Research has supported the use of the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 2000), a risk assessment instrument based purely on historical empirical correlates, to predict recidivism with a population of clergy child sexual offenders (Montana et al., 2012). The addition of dynamic factors, also described as psychologically meaningful risk factors (Mann, Hanson, & Thornton, 2010), to a structured risk assessment provides information about the source of risk, identifies appropriate targets of treatment, and improves the ability to predict risk of re-offense (Thornton, Hanson, & Helmus, 2009). This study compared the MMPI/MMPI-2 (Hathaway & McKinley, 1951; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) scale scores of 19 recidivist Catholic clergy and 232 non-recidivist Catholic clergy sex offenders, in order to identify personality-based risk markers for recidivism, and to more fully understand the psychologically meaningful risk factors that contribute to the offending behavior of this population. Four scales significantly predicted recidivism with moderate to large effect sizes, the Paranoia Scale, Hypomania Scale, Psychomotor Acceleration Content Scale, and the Ego Inflation Content Scale. It was argued that the interpretive correlates of psychopathology associated with these scales can be mapped onto psychologically meaningful factors empirically found to predict sex offender recidivism risk.