During the past 20 years, there have been significant developments in the area of offender assessment. As a result, this knowledge has placed the field in a position to construct guidelines as to w...

Offender risk assessment: Guidelines for selection and use.

As penal power has been transformed in recent years, so too have relationships between prisoners and staff. This article discusses how these relationships are forged by the terms of ‘neo-paternalism’, focusing in particular on what is labelled ‘soft power’. It describes some of the impediments that hinder the development of closer relationships between prisoners and uniformed staff. It explores the implications of soft power for the prison’s interior legitimacy, and discusses soft power in relation to the culture of uniformed staff.

Soft power in prison: Implications for staff–prisoner relationships, liberty and legitimacy:

Mentally ill inmates now comprise a substantial portion of the prison population and pose administrative and therapeutic challenges to prison administrators and mental health professionals. Some ev...

http://www.antoniocasella.eu/archipsy/Adams_2008.pdf

Managing mentally ill inmates in prisons

About the Editors. List of Contributors. Foreword. Series Editors' Preface. Editors' Preface. Acknowledgement. PART I INTRODUCTION. 1 History of the Offence Paralleling Behaviour Construct and Related Concepts (Lawrence Jones). 2 Case Formulation in Forensic Psychology (Peter Sturmey). 3 Distinctions within Distinctions: The Challenges of Heterogeneity and Causality in the Formulation and Treatment of Violence (Kevin Howells). PART II THE APPLICATION OF OPB TO ASSESSMENT AND TREATMENT OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOURS. 4 Approaches to Developing OPB Formulations (Lawrence Jones). 5 Offence Paralleling Behaviour and Multiple Sequential Functional Analysis (David M. Gresswell and David L. Dawson). 6 A Structured Cognitive Behavioural Approach to the Assessment and Treatment of Violent Offenders Using Offence Paralleling Behaviour (Michael Daffern). 7 Applying the Concept of Offence Paralleling Behaviour to Sex Offender Assessment in Secure Settings (Ruth E. Mann, David Thornton, Simone Wakama, Maisie Dyson and David Atkinson). 8 Functional Consistency in Female Forensic Psychiatric Patients: An Action System Theory Approach (Katarina Fritzon and Sarah Miller). 9 The Assessment and Treatment of Offence Paralleling Behaviours in Young Offenders: Added Complications or Greater Opportunities for Change? (Zainab Al-Attar). 10 Offence Analogue Behaviours as Indicators of Criminogenic Need and Treatment Progress in Custodial Settings (Audrey Gordon and Stephen C.P. Wong). 11 Institutional Offence Behaviour Monitoring as an Aid to Community Supervision of High-Risk Offenders: Experience from Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Cynthia McDougall, Dominic Pearson, Roger Bowles and Judith Cornick). 12 Working with Offence Paralleling Behaviour in a Therapeutic Community Setting (John Shine). 13 A Qualitative Exploration of Offence Paralleling Behaviour: A Prison-based Democratic Therapeutic Community Resident's Perspective (Natalie Bond and Gail Steptoe-Warren). 14 Unlocking Offence Paralleling Behaviour in a Custodial Setting - a Personal Perspective from Members of Staff and a Resident in a Forensic Therapeutic Community (Helen Dowdswell, Geraldine Akerman and Lawrence). 15 Psychiatric Nurses Working with Offence Paralleling Behaviour (Trish Martin). 16 Offenders with Severe Personality Disorder and 'Lifestyle Paralleling Behaviours' (Corinne Spearing, Victoria Wasteney and Phil Morgan). 17 Substance Misuse Paralleling Behaviour in Detained Offenders (Glen Thomas and John Hodge). 18 Evaluating Individual Change (Jason Davies, Lawrence Jones and Kevin Howells). 19 A Psychodynamic Perspective on Offence Paralleling Behaviour (Cleo Van Velsen). PART III CONCLUSION. 20 Summary and Future Directions (Lawrence Jones, Michael Daffern and John Shine). Index.

Offence paralleling behaviour: A case formulation approach to offender assessment and intervention.

Refining the definition of Offence Paralleling Behaviour

A review of the literature relating to the assessment of risk in incarcerated offenders is given. A new methodology for the actuarial assessment of risk based on the prediction of the way in which offending behaviour traits will be manifest in the prison environment is described. A validation of this methodology is described giving a level of accuracy of 65 per cent. A measure of the accuracy, the rated percentage agreement (RPA), is described and the inter-rater reliability of the methodology is investigated. The utility of the instrument in a prison environment is outlined and implications for future refinement and validation are discussed. A long-standing problem for the criminal justice system has been how to assess accurately the risk of re-offending for long-term prisoners, serving indeterminate sentences, convicted of serious offences. The fact that the vast majority of these offenders will eventually be released, and the desire effectively to integrate them into the community, must be balanced against the need to protect the public from the risk of further serious offences. Proposed changes introduced by the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, the decision by the European Courts regarding the right of discretionary lifers to challenge their continued incarceration, and the advent of more open reporting within the English prison system have brought the criteria and methods used to establish risk under close scrutiny. 'It is widely acknowledged that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour,' write Owens and Schoenfeldt (1979). This statement is demonstrably true for criminal behaviour, where virtually all major reviewers (Cornish and Clarke 1975; Farrington and West 1990; Andrews 1983; Hill 1985) have concluded that the best predictor of recidivism is the type and frequency of previous convictions. This finding applies across all ages, offence types, and cultures, and is quite in keeping with current psychological theories. However, when attempting to assess risk of re-offending among a group of serious offenders serving long sentences, several problems are encountered. One problem is that of base rate; the frequency of serious criminal offences (i.e. serious violent or sexual assaults) is fairly low even in such a population. Thus, predicting from past behaviour, one would expect very few of these offenders to re-offend. Unfortun ately, the consequences of a second similar offence are too great for one to accept this general prediction. A second difficulty is that data available at the beginning of sentence do not change over time. So, although one might compute sufficiently accurate actuarial parole risk scales for offenders (Andrews 1983), the level of risk suggested by such tools cannot change over time. Therefore a prisoner assessed with this pre-conviction data is judged to be equally at risk of re-offending the day after sentence and twenty years later. It is possible that this might well be the case, but it

Catriona McDougall

Papers

A new methodology for assessing the level of risk in incarcerated offenders