The history of risk assessment in criminal justice has been written on several occasions (Andrews & Bonta, 2003; Clements, 1996; Hollin, 2002). Here we assess progress since Andrews, Bonta, and Hoge’s (1990; Andrews, Zinger, et al., 1990) statement of the human service principles of risk-needresponsivity (RNR) and professional discretion. In those articles, the corrections-based terms of risk and need were transformed into principles addressing the major clinical issues of who receives treatment (higher risk cases), what intermediate targets are set (reduce criminogenic needs), and what treatment strategies are employed (match strategies to the learning styles and motivation of cases: the principles of general and specific responsivity). General responsivity asserts the general power of behavioral, social learning, and cognitive-behavioral strategies. Specific responsivity suggests matching of service with personality, motivation, and ability and with demographics such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Nonadherence is possible for stated reasons under the principle of professional discretion. Expanded sets of principles now include consideration of case strengths, setting of multiple criminogenic needs as targets, community-based, staff relationship and structuring skills, and a management focus on integrity through the selection, training, and clinical supervision of staff and organizational supports (Andrews, 2001). The review is conducted in the context of the advent of the fourth generation of offender assessment. Bonta (1996) earlier described three generations of risk assessment. The first generation (1G) consisted mainly of unstructured professional judgments of the probability of offending behavior. A

The Recent Past and Near Future of Risk and/or Need Assessment

Actuarial risk assessment tools are used extensively to predict future violence, but previous studies comparing their predictive accuracies have produced inconsistent findings as a result of various methodological issues. We conducted meta-analyses of the effect sizes of 9 commonly used risk assessment tools and their subscales to compare their predictive efficacies for violence. The effect sizes were extracted from 28 original reports published between 1999 and 2008, which assessed the predictive accuracy of more than one tool. We used a within-subject design to improve statistical power and multilevel regression models to disentangle random effects of variation between studies and tools and to adjust for study features. All 9 tools and their subscales predicted violence at about the same moderate level of predictive efficacy with the exception of Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R) Factor 1, which predicted violence only at chance level among men. Approximately 25% of the total variance was due to differences between tools, whereas approximately 85% of heterogeneity between studies was explained by methodological features (age, length of follow-up, different types of violent outcome, sex, and sex-related interactions). Sex-differentiated efficacy was found for a small number of the tools. If the intention is only to predict future violence, then the 9 tools are essentially interchangeable; the selection of which tool to use in practice should depend on what other functions the tool can perform rather than on its efficacy in predicting violence. The moderate level of predictive accuracy of these tools suggests that they should not be used solely for some criminal justice decision making that requires a very high level of accuracy such as preventive detention.

The Efficacy of Violence Prediction: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Nine Risk Assessment Tools.

Few psychological concepts evoke simultaneously as much fascination and misunderstanding as psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. Typically, individuals with psychopathy are misconceived as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous. Popular portrayals of "psychopaths" are diverse and conflicting, ranging from uncommonly impulsive and violent criminal offenders to corporate figures who callously and skillfully manuever their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder. Despite this diversity of perspectives, a single well- validated measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; 2003), has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years. The items of the PCL-R cover two basic content domains--an interpersonal-affective domain that encompasses core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness and an antisocial domain that entails disinhibition and chronic antisocial behavior. In most Western countries, the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions about criminal offenders that hinge upon issues of dangerousness and treatability. In fact, clinicians in many cases choose the PCL-R over other, purpose-built risk-assessment tools to inform their opinions about what sentence offenders should receive, whether they should be indefinitely incarcerated as a "dangerous offender" or "sexually violent predator," or whether they should be transferred from juvenile to adult court. The PCL-R has played an extraordinarily generative role in research and practice over the past three decades--so much so, that concerns have been raised that the measure has become equated in many minds with the psychopathy construct itself (Skeem & Cooke 2010a). Equating a measure with a construct may impede scientific progress because it disregards the basic principle that measures always imperfectly operationalize constructs and that our understanding of a construct is ever-evolving (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). In virtually any domain, the construct-validation process is an incremental one that entails shifts in conceptualization and measurement at successive points in the process of clarifying the nature and boundaries of a hypothetical entity. Despite the predominance of the PCL-R measurement model in recent years, vigorous scientific debates have continued regarding what psychopathy is and what it is not. Should adaptive, positive-adjustment features (on one hand) and criminal and antisocial behaviors (on the other) be considered essential features of the construct? Are anxious and emotionally reactive people that are identified as psychopaths by the PCL-R and other measures truly psychopathic? More fundamentally, is psychopathy a unitary entity (i.e., a global syndrome with a discrete underlying cause), or is it rather a configuration of several distinguishable, but intersecting trait dimensions? Although these and other controversies remain unresolved, theory and research on the PCL-R and alternative measures have begun to clarify the scope and boundaries of the psychopathy construct. In the current comprehensive review, we provide an integrative descriptive framework--the triarchic model--to help the reader make sense of differing conceptualizations. The essence of this model is that alternative perspectives on psychopathy emphasize, to varying degrees, three distinct observable (phenotypic) characteristics: boldness (or fearless dominance), meanness, and disinhibition. The triarchic framework is helpful for clarifying and reconciling seemingly disparate historical conceptions, modern operationalizations, and contemporary research programs on psychopathy. Our review addresses what psychopathy is, whether variants or subtypes exist (i.e., primary and secondary, unsuccessful and successful), the sorts of causal influences that contribute to psychopathy, how early in development psychopathy can validly be identified, and how psychopathy relates to future criminal behavior and treatment outcomes. Despite controversies and nuances inherent in each of these topics, the current state of scientific knowledge bears clear implications for public policy. Policy domains range from whether psychopathic individuals should be held responsible for their criminal actions to whether employers should screen job candidates for tendencies toward psychopathy. In many cases, the findings we review converge to challenge common assumptions that underpin modern applications of psychopathy measures and to call for cautions in their use. For example, contemporary measures of psychopathy, including the PCL-R, appear to evidence no special powers in predicting violence or other crime. Instead, they are about as predictive as purpose-built violence-risk-assessment tools, perhaps because they assess many of the same risk factors as those broader-band tools. Specifically, the PCL-R and other psychopathy measures derive most of their predictive utility from their "Factor 2" assessment of antisocial and disinhibitory tendencies; the "Factor 1" component of such measures, reflecting interpersonal and affective features more specific to psychopathy, play at best a small predictive role. Similarly, current measures of psychopathy do not appear to moderate the effects of treatment on violent and other criminal behavior. That is, an increasing number of studies suggest that psychopathic individuals are not uniquely "hopeless" cases who should be disqualified from treatment, but instead are general "high-risk" cases who need to be targeted for intensive treatment to maximize public safety. Misunderstandings about the criminal propensities and treatability of individuals achieving high scores on measures like the PCL-R have been perpetuated by professionals who interpret such high scores in a stereotypic manner, without considering nuances or issues of heterogeneity. A key message of our review is that classical psychopathy, whether measured by the PCL-R or other measures, is not monolithic; instead, it represents a constellation of multiple traits that may include, in varying degrees, the phenotypic domains of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Measures such as the PCL-R that do not directly assess features of low anxiety, fearlessness, or boldness more broadly tend to identify heterogeneous subgroups of individuals as psychopathic. As a consequence, efforts to apply one-size-fits-all public policies to psychopathic individuals may be doomed to failure. In aggregrate, these conclusions may help to shed light on what psychopathy is, and what it is not, and to guide policy interventions directed toward improved public health and public safety. Language: en

Psychopathic Personality Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy

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.

English translation of the study not available): The aim of this study was to assess the potential for future violent behaviour comparing patients recruited from forensic and general psychiatric wards in Germany. Patients and methods. Fifty patients were recruited from a forensic hospital and 29 from a general psychiatric hospital. In the weeks preceding discharge, structured assessments of the future risk of violent behaviour were completed using the HCR-20. Results. There was little difference in the risk presented by the two groups. Forensic patients presented an elevated risk of violence because of historical factors, while the risk among patients from general psychiatry was due to clinical symptoms. Conclusion. Some criminal offences could be prevented if more time and effort were spent in general psychiatric practice in identifying patients at high risk for violence and in reducing symptoms of psychoses before discharge. Project and Scholarly Work Lindsay, W.R., Hogue, T.E., Taylor, J.L., Steptoe, L., Mooney, P., O’Brien, G., Johnston, S. et al. (2008). Risk assessment in offenders with intellectual disability: A comparison across three levels of security. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 52(1), 90-111.

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HCR-20 Violence Risk Assessment Scheme: Overview and Annotated Bibliography

Summary. The criminal courts in England and Wales may request the probation service to submit pre-sentence reports which are considered by magistrates and judges before making their sentencing decision. Pre-sentence reports must include an assessment of the risk of reoffending and the risk of harm to the public which the convicted offender presents. The offender group reconviction scale is a statistical aid to such risk assessment. We describe the scale and the statistical analysis on which it is based, and we discuss some statistical aspects of its interpretation and use.

The offender group reconviction scale: a statistical reconviction score for use by probation officers

Juvenile sexual offenders form a substantial part of the sexual offender population and a subset of them will continue offending against the person in general, and sexually in particular, into adulthood. Part of a strategy to reduce offending against the person, and sexual offending specifically, should therefore be to identify and treat high-risk juvenile sexual offenders. To identify the characteristics of such offenders, recidivism studies are traditionally used. After reviewing 11 recidivism studies we briefly discuss the difficulty of comparing the recidivism rates found by them. We then report the findings of a study that examined the official records of 326 male juvenile sexual offenders convicted in Western Australia from January 1990 to June 1998. During the follow-up period almost 7 in 10 of the offenders reoffended. Most were convicted of non-sexual offences, with only 1 in 10 convicted of new sexual offences. Offenders who reoffended against the person (sexual and non-sexual), constituted more...

Recidivism Among Male Juvenile Sexual Offenders in Western Australia

For decades American criminology has concerned itself with the links between ethnicity and crime; and similar preoccupations have much more recently been apparent in the European literature. Concerns in Britain about ethnic minorities as suspects and offenders have tended to centre on black people — that is, those of Caribbean and African origin — rather than Asians, and they have been documented mainly by reference to prison statistics. Until recently1 these have been the only available national source of criminal justice data on ethnic minorities. They have consistently shown a significant over-representation of black prisoners relative to the black population resident in England and Wales and this is especially marked in the case of women.

Ethnic Minorities in British Prisons: Some Research Implications

The question "Does parole work?" remains unanswered, as evidenced by moves to abolish or limit it in various jurisdictions. For example, England and Wales has legislation on its statute books which to all intents and purposes abolishes parole. Antipodean jurisdictions have also considered this. Although to date none has yet abolished it, discretionary early release regularly comes under critical scrutiny. This paper attempts to add to the relatively limited literature addressing the question. It reports on a sophisticated analysis of data on prisoners released in England and Wales, to determine whether there is any reduction in recidivism which can be ascribed to the process of release on parole. It finds a small, but consistent, effect in favour of parole, on a number of outcome measures.

Does Parole Work? A Post-Release Comparison of Reconviction Rates for Paroled and Non-Paroled Prisoners

The statistics in this publication are derived from quarterly reports on juvenile detention submitted to the Australian Institute of Criminology by the relevant juvenile justice authorities in each Australian jurisdiction. The publication comments on legislative differences between jurisdictions, hanges from previous reports, calculating rates of detention per head of relevant population, the method of calculating Indigenous over representation, and general trends, 1981 to 2001. Statistics are resented for males, females and total numbers in juvenile detention, 1981-2001; Indigenous people in juvenile detention, 1994-2001; males, females, people aged 10 to 17 and people aged over 18 in juvenile detention, 2000-2001; percentage of entenced people in juvenile detention, 2000-2001; and level of over representation of Indigenous people in juvenile detention, 1994-2001 (on a state by state basis). The figures show that over the past twenty years, there has been a general decline in the number of people aged 10 to 17 in juvenile detention centres throughout Australia.

Peter Marshall

Papers

The offender group reconviction scale: a statistical reconviction score for use by probation officers

Recidivism Among Male Juvenile Sexual Offenders in Western Australia

Ethnic Minorities in British Prisons: Some Research Implications

Does Parole Work? A Post-Release Comparison of Reconviction Rates for Paroled and Non-Paroled Prisoners

Statistics on juvenile detention in Australia : 1981-2001