The intrusion of politics in clinical assessment can be seen in a Canadian study showing that less dangerous homosexual pedophiles received more severe sentences than more dangerous sexual offenders including violent heterosexual rapists, illustrating the Canadian Government's punitive attitude toward homosexuality and the use of psychiatry as an instrument of repression. In addition to political influences, predictions of dangerousness suffer from methodological flaws that contribute to high error rates, including both false positives and false negatives. Nevertheless, protective and indeterminate sentences will remain a reality, and psychiatrists will continue to be asked for predictions of dangerousness. As actuarial and purely clinical approaches to prediction are ineffective, alternative strategies, such as phenomenological approaches, which consider all the circumstances of the offense, the offender, and the victim, are needed. Case histories, 2 notes, and 38 references.