Lecture 7: Violence and Risk Assessment

Question 1

What is parole and who is eligible for it?

Answer 1

• parole: supervised release into the community after serving a set amount of your sentence in custody
  
  • You’re always going to get out before your sentence expires (except for life without chance of parole)
• Only receive if eligible (there are some crimes where you aren’t eligible for parole):
  
  • Either: 1) after an offender serves the first 1/3 of their sentence; or 2) 7 years—whichever is less
  • After 1/6 of your sentence: become eligible for things that will help you be more likely to get parole

Question 2

What are the four main types of parole?

Answer 2

Temporary absence, day parole, full parole, and statutory release

Question 3

Define temporary absence

Answer 3

• Temporary absence: First type of parole usually granted
• Escorted or unescorted temporary absence
• For substance abuse programs, family violence counselling, technical training
• You can leave, go do one specific thing, and come back

Question 4

Define day parole

Answer 4

• Day parole: Usually granted to participate in community based activities; i.e. doing a full-day community-based activity
• Must return to their institution or half-way house by the end of day
• Performance/behavior will be used in full parole review

Question 5

Define full parole

Answer 5

• Full parole: Serve the remainder of sentence supervised in community
• Usually must have been granted and completed temporary absences or day parole
• Doesn’t mean your sentence is reduced, you’re just out of jail early
• Still have to be supervised and check in w/ your judge and officers, you can’t change your job/name/etc. without anyone knowing; i.e. still restricted until the end of your sentence

Question 6

Define statutory release

Answer 6

• Statutory release: If you’re eligible for parole, you’ll get statutory/mandatory release after serving 2/3 of sentence
• Transitional period: followed around during this last 1/3 of your sentence to make sure you’re transitioning well
  
  • Must follow parole conditions similar to probation and conditional release
  • Not qualified if you have a life sentence

Question 7

What is the goal of all parole decisions?

Answer 7

• Goal of all parole decisions: protection of society, both long and short term:
  
  • In short term, looks at undue risk to society if the offender is released
  • In longer term, considers if parole would help the offender return to the community as a law-abiding citizen

Question 8

What are the four main decision considerations for parole?

Answer 8

• 1) Protection of society
• 2) All available information considered
• 3) Must take the least restrictive choice (but still dependent on how severe the crime is) to still protect rights of the offender
• 4) Offenders must be given access to information regarding the decision (i.e. why they’re getting/not getting parole)

Question 9

What are the two different categories of offenders?

Answer 9

• Category 1: Offenders who have committed serious offences, usually involving violence
• Category 2: Offenders who have committed other offences
• Policies differ slightly depending on the type of offender

Question 10

What is involved in a preliminary risk assessment?

Answer 10

• 1) Factors that mostly can’t be changed, such as:
  
  • details of the offence
  • criminal history
  • social problems
  • mental status,
  • performance on earlier releases
  • relationships and employment
• 2) Probability of an offender to reoffend through their behaviour during temporary & day paroles

Question 11

What is involved in a secondary risk assessment?

Answer 11

• Psychological or psychiatric reports—opinions from professionals that indicates whether release would present an undue risk to society, including:
  
  • Information from victims
  • Whether the offender has received treatment
  • Whether the offender shows a good understanding of the seriousness and the effects of the offence
  • If the offender’s release plan shows control and support and is realistic and confirmed

Question 12

[T] What is risk management?

Answer 12

• risk management: “involves reducing the probability that an individual will be violent by describing the conditions that may increase or decrease the individual’s risk for violence”

Question 13

What is a violence risk assessment and what is it based on?

Answer 13

• violence risk assessment: “assessing an individual’s likelihood of committing future violence”
  
  • “The process of evaluating individuals to (1) characterize the likelihood they will commit acts of violence and (2) develop interventions to manage or reduce that likelihood”
• The critical function of risk assessment is violence prevention, not violence prediction
  
  • It doesn’t matter too much whether these prevention tools are accurate, as the sentence for an individual won’t change
  • Worst case scenario: they stay in jail longer than they would’ve otherwise
• How do we define violence?
  
  • Physical injury vs. psychological damage
  • Actual harm vs. intent
  • Instrumental vs. reactive
  • Sexual vs. non-sexual
• Before it was just a measure of someone’s “dangerousness” but that’s not really accurate & there are no baselines
  
  • How do we know that they’re usually like this?
  • How do they compare to other people who’ve committed similar crimes?
• Risk assessment, on the other hand, is based on a specific crime (and the likelihood of committing this crime again)
  
  • Focusses on how they’ve rehabilitated themselves & taken measures to prevent future violence

Question 14

[T] What 5 questions should a violence risk assessment ask?

Answer 14

• (1) What is the nature of the violence that may occur?
  
  • For example, is it likely to be physical, sexual, or both?
• (2) What is the likely severity or seriousness of the violence?
  
  • For example, will the individual punch or shoot his or her spouse?
• (3) What is the frequency of the violence or how often might the violence occur? Is it likely to be an ongoing threat or a one-time act such as a planned bombing?
• (4) How imminent is the violence?
• (5) What is the likelihood or probability that violence will occur? Is the chance that the individual will engage in future violence low, moderate, or high?

Question 15

[T] What is the importance of understanding base rates of violence in violent risk assessment?

Answer 15

• “if the base rate is low—that is, if the behaviour is very infrequent—our ability to predict that behaviour will be very limited”
• “Given a predictive accuracy rate of 80%, we see that false positives go up as base rates go down” (from 50% to 10%)
• “ignoring or being unaware of base rates concerning violent behaviour is the most significant form of predictive error made by mental health professionals conducting violence risk assessments”

Question 16

What are static risk factors?

Answer 16

• static risk factors: facts about the case, can’t change, (gender, time of crime, age etc.)

Question 17

What are dynamic risk factors?

Answer 17

• dynamic risk factors: factors that can fluctuate over time, are amenable to treatment (anger management, substance abuse issues)
  
  • “A major dynamic factor is lack of insight into one’s own functioning, behaviour, or mental health problems”
• “Impulsivity, the inability to exert control over one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviours, and lack of responsiveness to treatment are additional dynamic risk factors”

Question 18

[T] What are protective factors?

Answer 18

• protective factors: “variables that can compensate for a person’s risk factors and constitute strengths or resiliencies against adverse outcomes”
• Focussing too much on risk factors is deficit-focussed → inaccurate predictions

Question 19

What are the four major types of risk factors for violence?

Answer 19

• Dispositional (gender, age)
• Historical (what has happened to you in your past)
• Contextual (what is the context)
• Clinical (what are the clinical factors, mental health factors)

Question 20

What are the three main dispositional risk factors?

Answer 20

• 1) Gender—90% of violent crimes done by men
• 2) Age—inversely related to risk; you’re less impulsive as you get older
• Psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder (could be dispositional as well as clinical)
  
  • APD significantly associated w/ criminality in adults
  • Psychopathy positively associated w/ parole failure and recidivism

Question 21

What are historical risk factors?

Answer 21

• Events experienced in the past and include general social history and specific criminal history variables, such as employment problems and a history of violence
  
  • Note: we’re comparing the variables of this person to other people who had these risk factors to determine the likelihood of violent behaviour if released on parole
  • There are people who do have these factors but do not commit crimes b/c of preventative factors that people who did commit crimes don’t have
• This research cannot be generalized to the broader population b/c it looks exclusively at people who have these risk factors and also have committed crimes

Question 22

What are the 6 main historical risk factors?

Answer 22

• 1) Previous antisocial and criminal behavior
  
  • If you’ve committed crimes before, you’re probably more likely to commit crimes in the future
  • Past nonviolent criminal behaviour is also a risk factor for future violent behaviour/recidivism b/c some criminals may escalate in their crimes
    
    • e.g. Nonviolent burglary turning into a violent crime in future
• 2) Conditional release, parole, and probation violation
  
  • Violating parole generally demonstrates lack of impulse control
• 3) Delinquency
  
  • Poor socialization/maladjustment to society → antisocial/criminal behaviour
  • Antisocial could either mean that you understand the rules & don’t want to live by them or asocial, you don’t understand the rules & are shunned
• 4) Dysfunctional family environment
  
  • Maladjustment to society, which may lead to delinquency, which may lead to criminal behaviour
  • e.g. Overly authoritarian parents, too lax parents
• 5) Physical and sexual abuse as a child
  
  • Cycle of abuse, general maladjustment
• 6) Age of onset
  
  • Different predictive factor than from dispositional factors
  • The earlier the first crime committed, the more likely someone is going to be at serious risk of future offense

Question 23

What are contextual risk factors and the three main factors involved?

Answer 23

• contextual risk factors: aspects of the individual’s current environment that can elevate the risk, such as access to victims or weapons, lack of social supports, and perceived stress, which can combine with the following 3 factors:
• 1) Unemployment, stemming from maladjustment to society (i.e. inability to find a job due to lack of responsibility or asocial behaviours)
• 2) Lack of intimate relationships, again, stemming from maladjustment/inability to date b/c you don’t know how to act appropriately
• 3) Access to weapons—more related to impulse control (vs. the first two, which are about maladjustment)

Question 24

Define clinical risk factors and identify the two major factors involved.

Answer 24

• clinical risk factors: symptoms of mental disorders that can contribute to violence, such as substance abuse or major psychoses
  
  • Mental illness in general tends to reduce the risk of recidivism or violence due to stigma—so we’re just talking about some specific aspects of mental
• 1) Mental illness—schizophrenia and mania, involving paranoid thinking & delusions of grandeur and/or persecution
• 2) Substance abuse—which generally leads to delusions & paranoia

Question 25

What are the two overarching risk factors?

Answer 25

• 1) Impulsivity/impulse control and 2) maladjustment to society and social instability
• Most of the other risk factors (historical, contextual, and clinical) relate to either impulse control or maladjustment

Question 26

What are the two risk factors for sexual deviance?

Answer 26

• Previous sexual deviance—which is different from sexual paraphilia
  
  • e.g. There’s a difference between having a foot fetish and breaking into women’s homes and cutting off their feet and stealing them
• Sexual preference for children—pedophilia & child molestation
  
  • Pedophiles who know it’s wrong to act on their urges may never attack a child
  • But other sexual psychopaths, who have specific targets, are often out to exercise power
    
    • i.e. They’re using children and/or elders to practice for attacking their actual targets
    • So they’re child molestors but it’s not necessarily about the children

Question 27

[T] What is an unstructured clinical judgment and what are its problems?

Answer 27

• “Intuitive approaches are sometimes referred to as unstructured clinical judgment because no rules specify how a clinician should collect and combine information”
• “One reason for the relative weakness of clinical prediction is the lack of feedback about success or failure”
  
  • “Without clear data on the accuracy of their predictions, clinicians are left to rely on biased thinking, a plausible but untested theory, mere intuition, or even prejudice”

Question 28

[T] What is actuarial prediction?

Answer 28

• actuarial prediction: “require that relevant risk factors be systematically combined (typically using a statistical equation) to calculate an estimate of future violence”
• a nomothetic, quantitative approach; i.e. based on characteristics identified in research on large groups of people and it relies on statistics
  
  • vs. clinical prediction which is an idiographic, qualitative approach that focuses on a specific individual and relies on subjective judgments made by a clinician

Question 29

[T] What is the Violence RIsk Appraisal Guide (VRAG)?

Answer 29

• Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG): followed 618 male patients released from a max security psychiatric hospital for 7 years
• Around 30% committed a new violent offence
• Researchers came up w/ 12 variables that best predicted reoffending w/ 74% accuracy

Question 30

[T] What are the three main concerns with actuarial measures?

Answer 30

• 1) generalizability: “how well these instruments work in conditions that are different from the original population and outcome on which they were based”
• 2) “applying group-level data to individuals results in much higher error rates when estimating risk levels for a given individual”
  
  • “Because they are based on large group (nomothetic) data, they do not often include rare factors that may be especially predictive or protective of risk in a particular case”
• 3) “Whether a clinician using an actuarial instrument should adjust his or her estimate of risk based on a rare factor is controversial”
  
  • e.g. “If the best actuarial methods suggest that a particular person is very unlikely to become violent but the person threatens to kill his mother while talking to a clinical psychologist, should the psychologist not take that information into account?”

Question 31

[T] What is a Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) and two examples?

Answer 31

• “Structured Professional Judgment (SPJ) instruments were designed to combine the accuracy of actuarial methods with the flexibility of clinical decision making”
• e.g. the Historical Clinical Risk Management Scheme (HCR-20) and Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START)

Question 32

[T] What is involved in the Historical Clinical Risk Management Scheme (HCR-20)?

Answer 32

• Consists of a checklist of 6 protective factors and 20 risk factors; analyzed using a 7-step model:
• 1) “evaluators gather and document case information about whether a series of risk factors are present or how they may have changed over time”
• 2) “evaluators rate each of the 20 risk items as no (not present or does not apply), possibly/partial (possibly or partially present), or yes (present)”
• 3) “evaluators rate the relevance of each risk factor”
• 4) “thinking through possible risk scenarios or imagining what kind of violence a person might commit in the future and why”
• 5) “identify and describe the most likely scenarios of future violence”
• 6) “recommending strategies for managing violence risk based on information from the earlier steps”
• 7) “evaluators document their judgments about overall risk and indicate whether there are any risks other than violence, such as suicide”

Question 33

[T] What is the Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability (START)?

Answer 33

• a newer SPJ tool that helps evaluators consider their clients’ strengths and weaknesses in the process of risk assessment”
• “assesses a much broader range of outcomes than the HCR-20, including violence, self-harm, suicide, substance abuse, unauthorized leave, self-neglect, and victimization”

Question 34

Does parole work?

Answer 34

• Statistics show that inmates that successfully completed day parole to obtain full parole are less likely to reoffend than inmates granted mandatory statutory release without doing any day paroles
• Those granted statutory release (i.e. didn’t complete any programs to get released since they get released automatically): at the greatest risk for recidivism
  
  • Often put back in prison for breach of condition of release
• Those granted full parole without doing day/temporary parole): would assume these people have less risk b/c they were able to be released early w/o doing anything
• Those granted full parole after doing day/temporary parole: also not at a lot of risk b/c they’ve taken their parole time to do some kind of program

Question 35

[T] What are dangerous offenders?

Answer 35

• 1997: introduction of Bill C-55 required “dangerous offenders” as identified by the courts to “face indeterminate detention and have to wait 7 years for parole instead of the original 3 years”
• “the new legislation allowed for the automatic presumption of dangerousness following three convictions for certain serious offences”
  
  • “This reverse onus clause shifted the burden of proving a defendant did not meet DO criteria to the defence”

Question 36

[T] What are long-term offenders and who usually receives this designation?

Answer 36

• “The LTO designation primarily targets sexual offenders and was developed in response to concerns that many serious sexual and violent offenders did not meet DO criteria but nevertheless warranted more extensive supervision to protect the public”
  
  • “criteria for an LTO designation most often involves a future prediction of a specific kind of risk—future sexual violence”
• “Canadian DOs are predominantly male, with only three women having ever received the designation.
• Aboriginal offenders are overrepresented among DOs, accounting for 26.4% of offenders, compared with 18.5% of the federal offender population and only 4% of the Canadian population”

Question 37

[T] What is the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model of offender rehabilitation?

Answer 37

• “assumes that there are key, empirically based social and psychological risk factors associated with offending, including violent offending, and that targeting dynamic risk factors in treatment will reduce reoffending rates”
• “the risk principle, the highest level of treatment resources should be focused on the highest risk offenders.
• The need principle dictates that interventions should address dynamic risk factors or criminogenic needs …
• The responsivity principle clarifies that treatment programs should be tailored to match the individual characteristics and needs of offenders to effectively reduce risk”

Question 38

[T] What is the Good Lives Model (GLM) of offender rehabilitation?

Answer 38

• “a strength-based model that takes a different approach than the more deficit-focused RNR model”
• “considers offenders’ preferences, values, and goals, and draws upon this understanding to motivate them to live better lives”
• “attempts to equip offenders with new capabilities and resources needed to obtain primary goods (activities, experiences or situations pursued for their own sake) in socially acceptable ways)