SUMMARY RISK ASSESSMENT

RISK ASSESSMENT YEAR 3

THIS SUMMARY DOES NOT GUARANTEE A PASSING GRADE ON THE EXAM. PLEASE READ
AND STUDY THE MATERIAL PROVIDED BY THE LECTURER.

ALL IMAGES BELONG TO THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNER AND ARE NOT MINE.

TIP: look for ‘the criminologist’ on YouTube for great example videos. Here’s an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=filtuNCRqvg

The Area Under the Curve (AUC) is the measure of the ability of a classifier to distinguish
between classes and is used as a summary of the ROC curve. The higher the AUC, the better
the performance of the model at distinguishing between the positive and negative classes.

Lecture 1 - introduction

Definition
 The attempt to predict the likelihood of future offending in order to identify
individuals in need of intervention
 Risk assessment must specify
o Behaviour (e.g., violent behaviour)
o Potential damage or harm caused by the behaviour (e.g., child sexual abuse)
o Probability that it will occur and under what circumstances

Types of factors in risk assessment
 Risk factors
o Characteristics that increase the risk of offence
o Static and dynamic
 protective factors
o Characteristics that decrease the likelihood of offence
o Treatment is not only fixing what has been broken, but also the preservation
and strengthening of what is good
o Protective factors can be conceptualized as prosocial means to achieve life
goals
o Good lives model (GLM) of rehabilitation
 Accomplish a good life by fulfilling the primary prosocial goals
 Offending = maladaptive attempt to attain the primary goals
o Interaction with risk factors
 If the protective factors are strong enough, they can buffer the
chances of risk factors
 Potentially more engaging and effective interventions
 Improvement protective factors → recidivism
o SAPROF
 Structured assessment of protective factors for violence risk

, 

Risk factors
 Static risk factors
o Not used in forensic psychiatry, only interesting for policy makers
o Not changeable/ treatable
o E.g., age, gender, ethnicity, first offense, type of offense, first conviction
o StatRec
 Static risk of recidivism → give general risk of re-offence
 Gender, age, country of birth, offence type, early convictions,
sequence of judicial contacts
o Static99-R
 Static risk assessment tool for sex offenders





 Dynamic risk factors
o changeable/ treatable

, o Interventions aim at the change of dynamic risk factors
 Causal status
o Also called cimininogenic dynamic needs
o RNR
 Risk, need responsivity model
 Risk principle
 Offenders at higher risk of reoffending will benefit most from
more intensive treatment
 Need principle
 Only those factors associated with reductions in recidivism
should be targeted during treatment
 Responsivity principle
 Interventions should be matched to offender characteristics
such as level of motivation, personal circumstances and
learning style
o Central eight criminogenic needs
 Antisocial attitudes/ orientation
 Antisocial peers
 Antisocial personality
 Antisocial behaviour patterns
 Absence of prosocial leisure/ recreational activities
 Dysfunctional family
 Employment issues
 Substance abuse problems
o Influential factors that are not necessarily related to criminal activities
 Personal distress
 Major mental disorder
 Low self-esteem
 Low physical activity
 Poor physical living conditions
 Low conventional ambition
 Insufficient fear of official punishment
o LS/ CMI
 Level of service/ case management inventory

Stable and acute dynamic factors
 Stable
o Modifiable but unlikely to change
 Changing maladaptive self-regulation happens slowly
o Personal skill deficits and learned behaviours
o Can be changed through a process of effortful treatment
o E.g., impulse control, poor attachment style
 Acute
o Modifiable and likely to change
o Highly transient conditions that only last hours or days
o Rapidly changing because of environment triggers or intrapersonal stress
o E.g. mood, intoxication

,  DRAOR
o Dynamic risk assessment for offender re-entry
o Recidivism risk in the community
o Inform case planning and risk management
o Stable and acute dynamic risk factors + protective factors
o Predicts: reconvictions, reimprisonment, breaches of parole

Dynamic risk factors, dual status
 Predictors of recidivism
 Potential causes of recidivism form and explanatory point of views and as predictors
 Cause effect hypothesis
o Assumptions
 Evidence for an association between risk factors and outcome, namely
reoffending
 There must be a causal relationship in the opposite direction
 The cause must precede the occurrence of the effect
 Do other inter-correlated factors for an observed association exist?
 When there is a cause between risk factor A and outcome B, the
mechanism must be explained

Composite constructs
 Each factor consists of several sub-factors and/ or single factors
o Antisocial cognition → attitudes, value, identity, anger management, etc.
 Risk factor consists of social factors, mental-state factors, biological factors, etc.
Lack specificity
 Risk factor A causes reoffending
 Very often, there is lack of explanatory theories
Grain problem
 Dynamic risk factors often have different levels of a more general to a more specific
domain
 Do we say narcissistic personality disorder is the risk, or the cluster B personality
disorder is the risk?

Normative concepts
 Behaving according to the rules of your culture, community, country, social setting
 Social and legal norms may not be violated
 Dynamic risk factors are difficult to translate in risk bands (low/ medium/ high)
o Dynamic, can change over time and is related to social triggers

When we talk about dynamic risk factors, we CANNOT speak about causal relationships!!

Generations of risk assessment instruments
 1st generation
o Unstructured professional judgment
 No underlying assessment instrument
 Not expensive, flexible, convenient, broadly accepted