This page serves as a repository for risk assessment resources for criminal justice practitioners and policymakers. Use the filters or search to find relevant documents and other information.
PSRAC
An Exemplar-Based Approach to Risk Assessment: Validating the Risk Management Systems Instrument
Uses a sample of people on supervised release by the U.S. Probation Office to explore the relationship between RMS scores and recidivism.
Are the Major Risk/Need Factors Predictive of Both Female and Male Reoffending? A Test With the Eight Domains of the Level of Service/Case Management Inventory
Assesses the gender neutrality of the LS/CMI and explores the relative contributions of risk level, gender, and their interaction to the prediction of recidivism.
Assessing Dynamic Risk and Protective Factors in the Community: Examining the Validity of the Dynamic Risk Assessment for Offender Re-entry (DRAOR)
Tests the validity of the DRAOR and suggests an alteration to the subscale structure of the tool.
Cross-Validation of the Risk Matrix 2000 Sexual and Violent Scales
Cross validates the accuracy of the RMS and RMV compared with the Static-99 and SVR-20 and demonstrates support for the use of RMS and RMV as risk-assessment measures in predicting sexual and nonsexual violent reconvictions.
Cross-Validation of the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ): An Offender Risk and Need Assessment Measure on Australian, British, Canadian, Singaporean, and American Offenders
Supports the validity of the SAQ on populations of different races, from different cultures, and convicted of different offenses, and contradicts concerns that the SAQ is susceptible to lying and self-presentation biases.
Development of the California Static Risk Assessment Instrument (CSRA)
Describes the creation, development, and validation of the CSRA.
Dynamic Risk Assessment in Sexual Offenders Using STABLE-2000 and the STABLE-2007: An Investigation of Predictive and Incremental Validity
Examines the predictive accuracy of the German versions of the STABLE-2000 and STABLE-2007 and demonstrates the moderate to good predictive ability of the STABLE-2007 even—in some cases—after controlling for static risk variables.
Empirically Examining the Risk of Intimate Partner Violence: The Revised Domestic Violence Screening Instrument (DVSI-R)
Demonstrates the concurrent and predictive validity of the DVSI-R and tests whether the levels of validity are sustained independent of demographics and forms of intimate violence.
Evaluating the Predictive Validity of the COMPAS Risk and Needs Assessment System
Examines the reliability and predictive validity of the COMPAS and concludes that the tool demonstrates a predictive power comparable to (and sometimes higher than) similar instruments in the field.
Incorporating Strengths into Quantitative Assessments of Criminal Risk for Adult Offenders
Demonstrates the value of integrating strengths into risk assessment tools by comparing the utility of the SPIn Pre-Screen’s aggregate risk and strength scores in predicting recidivism.
National scan of policy and practice in risk assessment
Illustrates lessons learned from surveying all 50 states and the District of Columbia on how risk and need assessments are used by criminal justice agencies.
Policy Digest: Human Decisions and Machine Predictions
Describes the implications of a study that shows how machine learning algorithms could lead to better criminal justice outcomes for both stakeholders and justice-involved populations.
Predicting First-Time Sexual Offending Among Prisoners Without a Prior Sex Offense History: The Minnesota Sexual Criminal Offending Risk Estimate (MnSCORE)
Describes the development of the MnSCORE as an effort to reduce first-time sexual offending and assesses the tool’s interrater reliability and predictive validity.
Predicting Recidivism Amongst Sexual Offenders: A Multi-site Study of Static-2002
Examines the predictive accuracy of the Static-2002 on people convicted of sex offenses in four different countries and supports the use of Static-2002 in applied assessments.
Predicting Recidivism by Mentally Disordered Offenders Using the LIS-R:SV
Measures the validity of the LSI-RSV for use with people in Australia with a mental illness and suggests that the tool is a good predictor of recidivism among people with mental disorders but not people with a dual diagnosis.
Predictive Validity of the SVR-20 and Static-99 in a Dutch Sample of Treated Sex Offenders
Compares the interrater reliability and predictive validity of the SVR-20 and Static-99 in assessing risk and predicting recidivism for sexual violence.
Pretrial Risk Assessment in Virginia
Summarizes the development and validation of the VPRAI and provides instructions for how to use the tool.
Reliability and Validity Study of the LSI-R Risk Assessment Instrument
Conducts a reliability and validation study of the LSI-R to assess the tool’s usefulness as a component of Pennsylvania’s parole decision making guidelines.
Risk Assessment Implementation Checklist
This checklist lays out action items for tool selection, validation, assessment process, and structured decision making stages.
Risk-Anticipated Community Supervision
Identifies a set of predictors that can be used by an agency to identify individuals who will be challenging to supervise, with the goal of developing an instrument for informing immediate, risk-anticipated security and treatment assignments for people under community supervision.