Current and Historical content scales for the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS)

Purpose. The objective of this study was to identify and validate general criminal thinking scales for the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) formed on the basis of item content. Methods. The 64 items that comprise the eight PICTS thinking style scales were rationally sorted into two general content scales: a scale composed of items believed to reflect current criminal attitudes and beliefs, and a scale that references past criminal attitudes and beliefs. Eliminating items that exhibited highly skewed distributions, that failed to discriminate between custody levels, that loaded weakly on the first factor of a principal components analysis, and that displayed minimal differentiation in correlations with the two content scales resulted in a 13‐item Current scale and a 12‐item Historical scale. Results. Data analyses of PICTS results attained by several different samples of offenders revealed divergent patterns of strength for the two content scales, with the Historical scale demonstrating greater stability and correlating better with past criminality and the Current scale being more effective in predicting future disciplinary and release outcome. Conclusions. The outcome of this study suggests that the Current scale furnishes a meaningful estimate of an offender's current criminal thinking which may be useful in predicting future criminality, while the Historical scale does a better job of assessing a person's criminal past which may or may not coincide with current criminal attitudes and beliefs.