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In the juvenile delinquency and adult criminal contexts, risk assessment is the identification of risk factors and protective factors that make involvement in crime more or less likely. Risk and protective factors can be either static or dynamic. Static factors are phenomena that cannot be changed through human intervention; dynamic risk factors are those that can be. Typical static factors include gender, age, and prior criminal history, while typical dynamic factors include psychoactive substance use, family support, and motivation to alter behavior. Risk assessment is usually a precursor to or coincident with needs assessment and risk management, which are efforts to identify and implement the best methods of curtailing dynamic risk factors and of enhancing dynamic protective factors.
Lawyers and courts are more likely to talk about "dangerousness" than risk assessment and risk management. But the term dangerousness aggregates risk factors, risk level, and seriousness of harm in a way that is difficult to disentangle. Risk assessment, by contrast, immediately raises the questions "risk of what?" and "how high is the risk?" Social scientists prefer speaking of the factors that are related to reoffending and of the interventions that can reduce the effect of those factors. This article will use social science terminology because it is more descriptive and most likely to be used by knowledgeable expert witnesses and treating professionals.
More specifically, this article discusses how risk and management/treatment needs might be assessed in the juvenile delinquency context. It will focus on risk assessment and risk management "instruments," protocols designed to standardize the evaluation of risk and of treatment success. In general, modern risk assessment techniques produce error rates below 50 percent for some classes of individuals, and the predictions they generate are significantly superior to random selection. Nonetheless, the ability of risk evaluators to make precise individualized predictions is compromised by their reliance on risk factors derived from dissimilar validation samples, small variable sets, and data about recidivism based on tangentially relevant outcome measures. In the juvenile context, assessment is complicated further by the fact that risk factors connected with juveniles are much more volatile and can change significantly within a short period of time. Finally, because most risk assessment techniques rely in part on demographic variables and other immutable or relatively...