The Trouble with Using Risk Assessment Instruments to Quantify the Chance of Future Offending

Risk assessments in carceral settings have proliferated in recent decades and are now prominent in numerous states and regions. A ubiquitous variety is actuarial risk assessment instruments that are used on children and adults to predict their future chance for misconduct (e.g., recidivism) in several vital decision points in carceral processing (e.g., pretrial confinement). These instruments rely on information about past behavior (e.g., criminal history) and an understanding of offending (e.g., antisocial personality) that is thought to be neutral, reliable, and enjoys predictive validity. However, it will be argued that when justice system personnel assess the chance of unwanted behavior in the future, several risk domains are differentially prevalent and more frequently experienced by some groups. Much of this disparity is caused by, or due to, forces external to those being assessed, for instance, inequitable social and economic conditions and inequitable decisions by justice personnel to arrest, charge, or sentence people of color. As such, risk assessment instruments inevitably and disproportionately mark some groups of people as a higher risk to violate rules, conditions, orders, or laws. Consequently, risk assessment instruments systematically disfavor disadvantage, and by inference, favor advantage, leading to the need for a radical shift in the taxonomy of classifying risk for future misconduct.

RADAR-iTE 2.0: An Instrument of the German State Protection – Structure, Development and Current Stage of Evaluation

RADAR-iTE is an actuarial risk assessment instrument developed specifically for the German Police in the field of state protection. The purpose of the instrument is the prioritization of individuals of the Islamist spectrum known by the police in terms of their risk to commit politically motivated serious violence in Germany. The specific requirements of an instrument developed for the police and the adapted research process are outlined. This is followed by the description of the evaluation and revision of the instrument after one year of application by the German police. The result of this process, the current version 2.0 of RADAR-iTE is introduced and an insight into the implementation process of the instrument is also provided. Finally, the limitations of RADAR-iTE are discussed

Signatures of Risk

Innovations in production technology and machinery increased efficiency and productivity but also introduced risk, especially if employees were given responsibilities for which they were not trained. Accidents that maimed employees and destroyed structures and equipment were commonplace. Recognizing and addressing risk were important to business survival. Risk also resided in environmental variability; flood and drought, hailstorms, high winds, and lightning could all affect grain production, river transport, water availability and quality, or distillery functions. Cattle and hogs in distillery feeding pens were susceptible to the same diseases that plagued the general livestock population, often with losses sufficient to force distillers into bankruptcy. Fires caused by mechanical failure, lightning, careless use of lanterns, or arson might destroy an entire distillery works. Insurers developed actuarial risk assessment techniques to reduce their vulnerability, and insurance premium rates forced distillers to consider building fire-resistant structures and increase the spacing between warehouses. This, in turn, changed the distilling landscape and introduced formal external controls into the distilling process.

Constituting the ‘sexually violent predator’: Law, forensic psychology, and the adjudication of risk

Considerable socio-legal scholarship demonstrates law’s constitutive power, and much criminological research has considered the effects of actuarial risk assessment. However, these strands have rarely been brought together to consider how legal risk assessment practices constitute sexual subjects. This article argues that law and forensic psychology co-constitute the category of the ‘sexually violent predator’ (SVP) as a distinct type of person through the use of psychiatric diagnosis and actuarial risk assessment. Contrary to dominant views of actuarialism as de-individualizing, this article asserts that SVP proceedings are centrally concerned with individualized intervention, yet such proceedings continue to produce static risk subjects rather than the dynamic subjects identified in recent research on actuarial practices. It is argued that this stems from entrenched cultural views of sexuality as a fixed essence inherent in individuals. The risk assemblage in SVP proceedings therefore presents a unique theoretical case that does not clearly fit prevailing accounts of actuarialism.