Offender Risk Assessment the Assessment

Offender Risk Assessment

The assessment of an offender's risk to re-offend is one of the most important tasks faced by those who work in a correctional environment. On a daily basis, prison staff, probation and parole officers, and parole board members are asked to make decisions that impact the safety of the public, institutional security, and the offender's liberty. These decisions require reliable and accurate assessments of the offender's risk to commit another crime, which leads us to the need for formal guidelines in the context of risk assessment models in order to promote this concept.

James Bonta (August 2002) tells readers that there is a long-standing debate between clinical and actuarial approached to risk assessment. The clinical model of risk assessment leaves the assessment of the offender to the subjective judgment of correctional staff, such as parole officers and prison guards, and clinical professionals, including psychologist, psychiatrists, and social workers. Within a clinical context, the assessment is carried out solely via individual training and experience and has no formal guidelines with which to formulate risk or to decide appropriate levels of security and supervision. The earliest risk assessment models were clinical in nature, and while they served their purpose of assessing an offender's basic psychological issues and/or addressing his level of psychiatric dysfunction, they do not function in the manner of predictive validity, which is the most critical factor of a risk assessment and the reason for formulating an assessment in the first place.

Over the past several decades, risk assessment has gone through several stages, such as the second generation risk assessments that did demonstrate reasonable predictive accuracy, but consisted mainly of static risk factors such as age and criminal history. While these static risk factors are good predictors of recidivism, these measurements provide limited information as to what needs to be done to reduce offender risk. (Van Voorhis, 2004) This is due to the fact that that a static risk factor by its very nature cannot be treated; once an offender has a static risk factor, it is always a risk factor.

Third generation risk instruments are referred to as risk-need assessments and consist of both static and dynamic risk factors. Dynamic risk factors, also termed criminogenic needs, are treatable because they can change. (Van Voorhis, 2004) the presence of a dynamic risk factor tells us what we can do to reduce the offender's risk. For example, if an offender presents with the dynamic risk factor of unemployment, efforts can be made to assist him in finding employment.

Bonta (August 2002) discusses the need to continue to utilize the more accurate and reliable actuarial approaches to risk management in order to assess risk factors and determine criminogenic needs. He relays his professional dismay that correctional psychologists are using specific tests in their work that cannot be considered actuarial measures, meaning they are not "structured, quantitative, and empirically linked to a relevant criterion." (Bonta, August 2002) Van Voorhis et. al. (January 28, 2008) discusses the issues of developing gender-appropriate risk assessments for female offenders. They state that the current instruments are based on standards that were originally developed for men and then applied to women with absolutely no concern for whether or not they were valid or appropriate. This is a factor that also needs to be considered in the development and utilization of risk-needs assessments.