Risk assessment for domestically violent men: Tools for criminal justice, offender intervention, and victim services.

Author(s):  
N. Zoe Hilton ◽  
Grant T. Harris ◽  
Marnie E. Rice
2000 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Emerson Dobash ◽  
Russell P. Dobash

In this article, the authors consider various approaches to the evaluation of criminal justice interventions in the area of domestic violence. Evaluations have been conducted on a range of interventions, but this article focuses particularly on evaluations of arrest and programs for violent abusers. The authors contrast randomized designs used in the primarily North American studies of arrest with the extant evaluations of abuser programs and argue for the use of more theoretically informed contextual evaluations of criminal justice interventions. Using their own 3-year evaluation study of two Scottish abuser programs, the authors demonstrate how the contextual approach is attuned to both outcome and process and results in more empirically informed assessments of how change is achieved in the behavior and orientations of violent men. The authors argue that evaluations of criminal justice-based interventions should be designed to fit the phenomena under consideration as well as the intervention itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel Eckhouse ◽  
Kristian Lum ◽  
Cynthia Conti-Cook ◽  
Julie Ciccolini

Scholars in several fields, including quantitative methodologists, legal scholars, and theoretically oriented criminologists, have launched robust debates about the fairness of quantitative risk assessment. As the Supreme Court considers addressing constitutional questions on the issue, we propose a framework for understanding the relationships among these debates: layers of bias. In the top layer, we identify challenges to fairness within the risk-assessment models themselves. We explain types of statistical fairness and the tradeoffs between them. The second layer covers biases embedded in data. Using data from a racially biased criminal justice system can lead to unmeasurable biases in both risk scores and outcome measures. The final layer engages conceptual problems with risk models: Is it fair to make criminal justice decisions about individuals based on groups? We show that each layer depends on the layers below it: Without assurances about the foundational layers, the fairness of the top layers is irrelevant.


Temida ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Pemberton ◽  
Frans Winkel ◽  
Mark Groenhuijsen

The two most prominent developments in criminal justice in the last twenty to thirty years are the rise of restorative justice and the recognition and improvement of the position of the victim. The first part of the paper discusses a theoretical model for victims within restorative justice that the researchers at the InterVICT research institute authors of this paper) are developing at this moment. This model incorporates current knowledge from social psychology and studies surrounding traumatic stress and provides a number of hypotheses that will be subsequently evaluated in practice with participants in restorative justice procedures. On the other hand, international legal protocols for restorative justice also lack a consistent victim-oriented perspective. To this end the European Forum for Victim Services has recently published a statement concerning the position of the victim within mediation. The second part of the paper addresses the central issues in this statement. Taken together the paper moves beyond criticism of restorative justice, as it hopes to redirect theory and implementation of restorative justice toward a stronger victim-orientation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Charlotte Barlow ◽  
Sandra Walklate ◽  
Kelly Johnson

The limits of inter-agency understandings of risk in the context of intimate partner violence are well documented. Informed by Hester’s (2011) ‘three planet’ analogy and using empirical data in one police force area in the south of England, this paper offers an exploration of intra-agency operations, focusing on police risk assessment practices. Exploring the policing risk lens and the victim-survivor journey together, findings highlight police operate with at least three risk assessment moments (call hander, front-line and Safeguarding Hub) and point to the tensions that result when failing to centralise victim-survivors’ own assessment of their risk. Using complexity theory, this paper examines the complex interplay of risk that occurs when the victim-survivor risk journey intersects with the policing aspect of the criminal justice process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 89 (5) ◽  
pp. 469-475
Author(s):  
Erika Lawrence ◽  
Callie Mazurek ◽  
Kathleen W. Reardon

Prejudice ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Endre Begby

This chapter addresses recent concerns about “algorithmic bias,” specifically in the context of the criminal justice process. Starting from a recent controversy about the use of “automated risk assessment tools” in criminal sentencing and parole hearings, where evidence suggests that such tools effectively discriminate against minority defendants, this chapter argues that the problem here has nothing in particular to do with algorithm-assisted reasoning, nor is it in any clear sense a case of epistemic bias. Rather, given the data set that we are given to work with, there is reason to think that no improvement to our epistemic routines would deliver significantly better results. Instead, the bias is effectively encoded into the data set itself, via a long history of institutionalized racism. This suggests a different diagnosis of the problem: in deeply divided societies, there may just be no way to simultaneously satisfy our moral ideals and our epistemic ideals.


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