Recommendations for expert opinions about predictions: Empirically based recommendations for forensic expert opinions on legal prognosis

These recommendations show a scientifically based method and procedure to generate case-based, individual forecasts of criminal relapse. The method is to analyze the specific, individual dangerousness of a person, that has emerged in his former crimes, and to localize them in the realm of empirical knowledge about risk factors and delinquent courses of life. The forensic expert opinion has to record the specifics of the individual biography, course of delinquency, issues of mental or personality disorder, screen and motivation of former crimes, and has to transform these data into a case-based individual theory of this person's delinquency. This theory has to be adjusted to the scientific background of general experience. This individualized hypothesis of delinquency leads to an appraisal of the social behavior in the future under defined social conditions.