Abstract
Community correction, as a new form of crime punishment towards restorative justice, is being widely practiced in China. This paper, adopting an ethnographic method, explores the exchange structure of risk assessment in community correction by analyzing a dataset of 12 assessments. The study finds that the risk assessment discourse is replete with the informing exchange (formulized as K1^(K2f)) and eliciting exchange (formulized as K2^K1). It further discusses how the canonical structures are invalidated and what variant structures could address the issue. These findings suggest that judicial social workers need to raise their linguistic awareness and offenders need more effective linguistic choices in order to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of risk assessment.
