Criminal Risk Assessment PDF

CRIMINAL RISK ASSESSMENT

INTRODUCTION
• Risk assessment in the criminal justice system tends to
answer the question:
“What is the possibility that someone who has
committed a crime will reoffend?”
• Risk assessment tools are majorly used by
probation officers, psychiatrists, psychologists
among others to assess the risk of criminal
offending violent offending and sexual offending
and to recommend whether an offender should be
placed in long - term psychiatric care.

FORM OF RISK
ASSESSMENT
• There are two major forms of risk assessment; structured and
unstructured. Structured risk assessment has gained popularity over
the years since studies show that unstructured risk assessments have
often proved to give wrong results since they are confined to only
professional expertise. (Kamorowsk et.al., 2018) In this paper, we
shall discuss two structured risk assessment tools which involve:
• Actuarial Decision making tool ;and
• Structured Professional judgment tool

RISK ASSESSMENT
TOOLS
ACTUARIAL DECISION MAKING TOOL
• Actuarial decision making involves the application of
algorithms, equations and decision rules to a set of
combined risk factors so as to arrive at predictive
decision. This is a tool that has been majorly used in
coming up with conclusive predictions in the field of
psychology.