Module 04: Reflection Assignment 4: Shelley and Dr. Paul Gendreau Discuss Risk Assessment
Shelley Brown: Hello, everybody. Welcome, Criminal Behavior class out there. I’m here with Dr. Paul Gendreau. Welcome. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me and the students and share your wisdom with us.
Right now, I have one question for you. And I want to know if you have anything to say about the principles of risk assessments.
Paul Gendreau: Not a great deal.
[Laughter]
Shelley Brown: Well, that’s short. That’s a short segment.
Paul Gendreau: Here it is.
Shelley Brown: Maybe we can define risk assessment first.
Paul Gendreau: Sure we can. It’s important to, well, I mean, first of all, you have to ask, why is this individual committing crimes? Why are they in trouble with the law?
What are those characteristics that the individual, on a personal level and their past, bring to the table? So risk assessment tries to include all of those variables that have been found to be predictive of criminal behavior.
Shelley Brown: Got it.
Paul Gendreau: They can go from static variables, which you can’t do anything about it, because they’re part of the history, such as a previous record, and so on and so forth, family factors. And they can go to presently what the individual thinks, such as anti-social attitudes and values.
So those are what are called “risk factors.” And some factors are not predictive of criminal behavior. And so they shouldn’t be part of a risk assessment
Shelley Brown: Got it.
Paul Gendreau: unless you’re looking at some specific factors in an individual that may be unique to them.
Shelley Brown: OK, students, risk factors, and a number of the risk factors that Dr. Gendreau noted, they should be familiar to you by now. And they fall within the central eight. OK. All right, so we know what risk factors are now. And we’ve talked about risk assessment. So, comments.
Paul Gendreau: Well, certainly, when it comes to the ego, I’m not a shrinking violet always. So I think the classic study that came out, and I recommend people take a look at it, because it still gets cited a lot, is in 1996 in Criminology, where Claire Goggin and I generated a huge meta-analysis.
Shelley Brown: That’s right.
Paul Gendreau: Don Andrews was involved in it in helping us support this kind of inquiry through Carleton University when I was at UNV. And there, the importance of that meta-analysis was that it, previously, when people were trying to assess offenders, they would take a look at it only a very few variables, such as your age, your number of probations you had in the past, whether you ever went to prison, and so on and so forth.
And psychological factors such as attitudes and values were denigrated. And this reflected, in part, a war that was going on in criminology versus psychology.
Shelley Brown: Disciplines engaged in warfare?
Paul Gendreau: Oh my god. It is, more comments on that later. So the importance of this initial work back in ’96 was to say, hey, look, those factors in an individual’s background, their beliefs, and so on and so forth, are as important a predictor of criminal behavior as static factors and previous history.
Why is that important? Because if these needs, criminogenic needs, are a predictor of criminal behaviors as well as static factors, then we can do something about changing the offender.
And that’s where your work and others have come in to place because if you can get an individual and you can find out what level of anti-social attitudes and values there are, assuming they are reasonably high, you can try to change those values and monitor whether these changes, whether getting worse or better, lead to less recidivism.
And so this particular article, I think, laid the groundwork for it. And it was sort of the starting point. So in kind of a way, it was a meta-analysis that was similar to the classic Andrews, Bonta, Gendreau, Collin, Zinger paper, which was an important signpost for finding a direction as to how we’re going to develop better interventions.
Right now, to me, it seems straightforward. There’s a debate, I guess, in the literature, saying, that the measures that are used, that have been developed to assess risk, are biased by race. That’s a current, big debate now.
And there’s a lot of debate about, well, what may be the best measure, the most accurate one? I was involved on that in a deliberate attempt to get controversy going in a debate about the PCL versus the LSI. And some people
Shelley Brown: So maybe I can just interject. PCLR, the Psychopathy Checklist Revised tool used to measure psychopathy, psychopathic personality behavioral traits. And the LSI, Level of Service Inventory risk needs assessment tool, to assess these risk factors we’ve been talking about.
Paul Gendreau: And there’s also a debate over cutoffs. How high a risk should an individual be if you want to intervene in them? And that’s a sliding scale as to where you should put the cutoff scores.
It’s very much like if you’re selecting job candidates and I’m moving over into the Hunter and Schmidt job selection area. You establish a certain criteria that, in some ways, it can sound sort of cruel. Well, if you get a certain point or less, that it depends. It’s almost like getting admission to university if you have a certain GPA.
Shelley Brown: So if you’ve got a scale, you’ve got all these items, all these risk factors, and you’re interviewing the offender, the person in front of you. And you score them. And you get a score.
And maybe it goes from 0 to 40. And the higher you score, the more risk you are, the more riskier you’re deemed if we let you out of prison.
And the issue is cutoff. I might get 25. Dr. Gendreau might get a 26. Maybe the policy in a given person is that 25 is the cutoff, right?
25 and below, you’re going to minimum, nice, cozy prison environment. 26 and above, poor Dr. Gendreau here, he’s spending the next five years in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. So that’s the issue of cutoffs on these risk tools.
Paul Gendreau: And there’s ways of dealing with it. We have what we call the “override principle,” where you can say, well, even though this person is not high enough, we think there’s other aspects to it. And maybe we should include them. So you try to have humane discretion involved in these things.
As for the best measure, there have been a number of articles. One was with Campbell, French, two colleagues of mine and myself in 2009, comparing predicting violent behavior and a variety of measures. And many of them are relatively indistinguishable. They’re very close.
So then your choice has to be from the point of view of rehabilitation, of changing an offender, of measuring change, which obviously, you’re very much on top of, you should have a measure that has a number of what we call “criminogenic needs.”
You can certainly put in previous history, previous probations, age at first getting involved in an offense. But you should have a number of items that target attitudes and values at the present time.
So therefore, you can then case manage. Because if you’re a probation officer or you’re a therapist running a program, you have to manage that case, have to develop the treatment that will target those values, anti- social values, and then measure change and see if the program is working.
So the LSI, to me, is a highly useful measure and our preference, rather than measures that are sort of fixed.
Shelley Brown: OK. So, for the students out there, in closing, what do you think’s important for them to know? I’m just thinking for the students that might choose a career in corrections as a parole officer, psychologist. What’s an important message for them regarding risk assessment? What’s one thing?
Paul Gendreau: Well, use it.
Shelley Brown: Use it. Yes.
Paul Gendreau: And in that way, you can guide your decisions empirically. In that way, you have a intellectual defense for your policies. So if something turns out badly with your probationer, as it sometimes will, then you can say, well here’s what I did.
The existing science is far from perfect. But I have a rationale for doing what I did in the management of individuals. So that’s why you should be using these measures of measure change.
Shelley Brown: OK. Here that? If you’re working in the field in corrections one day, use these risk assessment tools, regardless of what your gut may be telling you. All right, thanks very much for that.
Paul Gendreau: You’re welcome.
Read this interview and answer the following questions.
Based on the interview with Dr. Gendreau, what would you say the value is of capturing dynamic risk factors in risk assessments of offenders (e.g., what value do they bring, over static risk factors, for treatment providers or probation officers)?
