7-6-2008 Scotland:
The system used by Scottish police, social workers and prisons to decide whether offenders will strike again is unreliable, researchers claim
Sex offenders are being wrongly released because the system used to assess their risk to the public is flawed, a new report has claimed.
Researchers warn that the Risk Matrix 2000 system, used by the police, social workers and the Scottish Prison Service, to determine the likelihood of sex attackers reoffending, is unreliable and should be scrapped.
Risk Matrix predictions are presented to judges and sheriffs when offenders are sentenced and are part of the criteria on whether they should be considered for early release. They are used by the police to determine which offenders should be monitored most closely on release.
There are more than 3,500 people on the sex offenders register in Scotland, the majority of whom are assessed using Risk Matrix. They are given scores based on factors including the type of offence committed and who their victim was. They are categorised as at a low, medium, high, or very high risk of reoffending.
Psychologists at Glasgow Caledonian University, whose findings have been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, say that the system’s chances of predicting the behaviour of individuals is as low as 3%.
“It’s very popular and has been pushed by the government because it’s cheap, but it doesn’t actually work,” said Professor David Cooke, a clinical psychologist who was part of the research team. “Often offenders will be deemed to be low risk when they are actually high risk, and the opposite is true as well. The public is suffering because people who are high risk will be slipping through the net.”
Stuart Leggate, who murdered eight-year-old Mark Cummings in 2004 in Glasgow, was considered “medium risk” at the time of the killing. Leggate had been released early from a prison sentence for sex attacks on children.
The Risk Management Authority (RMA), a government group on risk assessment, published a study into Risk Matrix 2000 this year, which found it was a viable screening tool with a moderate level of accuracy.
Roisin Hall, the authority’s chief executive, said the system was used as a “starting point” for assessing offenders and many other factors were taken into consideration when determining risk status.
“We can never predict human behaviour and there’s always the danger that people will be wrongly classified.
“What the RMA is saying about the pros and cons of Risk Matrix is be sensible, be proportionate about it, and take other factors into consideration,” she said. ..News Source.. by Stuart MacDonald
July 6, 2008
Flawed assessment 'raising sex-attack risk'
November 20, 2007
Evaluating and Improving Risk Assessment Schemes for Sexual Recidivism: A Long-Term Follow-Up of Convicted Sexual Offenders
March 2007 217618
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Risk assessment plays a central role in the management of sexual offenders in the criminal justice system, impacting every level of decision-making. The specification of which offenders should be included in state registration or community notification, the distribution of treatment opportunities in prison, the determination of parole eligibility, the allocation of resources in monitoring and supervising offenders in the community, and the ultimate decision to remove the most serious offenders from the community through civil commitment all involve critical choices involving risk. The serious consequences to potential victims, to those offenders who no longer pose a threat to the community, but are denied their civil liberties, and to critical community funds that may be squandered as the result of inaccurate decisions all demand the guidance of the most accurate actuarial algorithms available. Because decisions must be made—even doing nothing constitutes a decision—to choose not to employ the most accurate decision-making algorithms is to choose to pay the costly price of a suboptimal decision.
The aim of the present study was to evaluate and to improve the decision-making algorithms that have been generated to assess risk in sexual offenders. More specifically, it was the task of this research project to evaluate the extant actuarials in a sample of sexual offenders on whom long-term follow up were available. We assessed the comparative accuracy of the major risk instruments over time and over subsamples, explored their underlying factor structure, examined the accuracy of a new assessment protocol (SRA Need Assessment; Thornton, 2002), and explored the potential for generating improved predictive instruments.
In a prior study we (Knight, 1999; Prentky, Knight, & Lee, 1997) had followed 599 offenders who had been referred to the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC) for evaluation between 1959 and 1984. Of these 266 (Bridgewater Treatment [BT] sample) had been committed to MTC as “sexually dangerous” and subsequently released, and 333 (Bridgewater Observation [BO] sample) had been determined not to be sexually dangerous and returned to finish their sentences. Of the 333 BO offenders 200 constituted a matched sample (on age at evaluation, marital status, and number of prior crimes) and 200 were randomly sampled from the entire sample BO population evaluated. There was an overlap of 67 offenders selected by both the random and matched process. For all these offenders we had accessed and integrated four outcome record sources, including the Massachusetts Board of Probation records, the Massachusetts Parole Board records, the Massachusetts Treatment Center Authorized Absence Program records, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records.
In the present study we accessed the archival clinical files for these offenders and coded these records both on modern empirically-derived, mechanical actuarials that have been developed since 1997 for predicting sexual recidivism, including the RRASOR (Hanson, 1997), the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 2000), the Static-2002 (Hanson & Thornton, 2003), the SORAG (Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1998), the MnSOST-R (Epperson, Kaul, Huot, Hesselton, Alexander, & Goldman, 1998), and the Risk Matrix 2000 (Thornton et al., 2003), on two structured clinical guidelines, the SVR-20 (Boer, Hart, Kropp, & Webster, 1997) and the A-SOAP-II (Prentky & Righthand, 2003), and on a new experimental measure, the SRA Needs Assessment (Thornton, 2002). Offenders were also categorized in the Massachusetts Treatment Center Rapist (MTC:R3) and Child Molester (MTC:CM3) typologies and diagnosed according the DSM-IV Antisocial Personality Disorder and Conduct Disorder criteria. All codings and judgments were carried out without any access to or knowledge about the follow-up status of the offenders.
The final report addressed six basic questions. We summarize the findings for each using this framework: ..more.. by Raymond A. Knight, Ph.D. ; David Thornton, Ph.D.
