Evaluating risk of reoffending for a young person who has come into conflict with the law serves several important functions. At the most basic level, a risk assessment can inform judicial decisions such as whether the youth can be released to community under supervision while awaiting a court date or if the youth should be detained in custody. Similarly, risk assessments can help inform sentencing after a young person has been convicted of a crime; for instance, high-risk youth committing more serious crimes may receive a longer sentence or perhaps a period of custody in a secure youth institution, while lower risk youth may be candidates for a community-based sentence. Perhaps most importantly, a risk assessment can identify those areas in which a young person may need the most help, the dosage of treatment required, and the level of supervision and monitoring in the community. Ultimately, the goal of risk assessment with juvenile offenders should be to inform strategies to prevent recidivism (reoffending) and thus to prevent the young person from becoming an adult offender.
With this primary goal, criminal risk assessments should be organized around the principles of risk, need, and responsivity. Briefly, a risk assessment should assess likelihood of recidivism in terms of assigning risk level, which then informs the intensity of risk management services; for instance, high-risk youth receive high-intensity treatment and supervision, while lower risk youth would require fewer services (risk principle).
Moreover, it is important that risk assessments identify risk factors linked to criminal behavior that have the potential to change, known as dynamic risk factors or criminogenic needs; these areas can be prioritized for risk management interventions to lower or reduce risk (need principle). Finally, risk assessments should identify unique characteristics in the youth (e.g., motivation, learning style, cultural heritage) that can impact response to risk management (responsivity principle).
The assessment of risk for reoffending in young people who come into contact with the law brings with it many challenges and responsibilities. This article reviews considerations unique to the assessment of youth and provides a brief overview of structured tools and recommended practices. A comprehensive risk assessment can be used to assess risk to inform the intensity of services (risk principle), identify areas to intervene linked to risk (need principle), and special considerations to adapt services to promote youth engagement (responsivity principle) to help prevent juvenile offenders from entering the adult justice system.
Factors Unique to Juvenile Offender Populations
The terms youth or juvenile typically refer to the developmental stage of adolescence and, specifically, to someone who is under the age of majority (18 years in Canada and the United States) but who may have begun the physical, social, and emotional process of maturation. The minimum age of criminal responsibility varies from one country to the next. For example, in the United States, most states do not have a minimum age with which a young person can be charged with a crime while the remainder (13 states) range from 6 to 12 years. In the United Kingdom, the minimum age of criminal responsibility ranges from 8 (Scotland) to 10 (England and Wales) years; in Canada, the age is 12 years; and in most European countries, the ages range from 12 to 15 years.
There are several factors that make juvenile offenders different from adult offenders. First, one important consideration is neurological development; for instance, development of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning, decision-making, ethical reasoning, monitoring, and inhibiting behavior, continues until the mid-20s and thus is not fully developed in youth. Second and relatedly, young people have greater difficulty controlling strong emotions and the behaviors associated with those emotions. They may act out impulsively without adequately considering the consequences and have a sense of invulnerability. With time, youth develop greater behavioral and emotional control and become increasingly socially and emotionally mature.
Third, since youth tend to live at home with their parents or other caregivers, the family plays a critical role. The parents are responsible for supervision, monitoring behavior, serving as role models, and providing consequences for misbehavior; when this system falls short on any of the aforementioned areas, or condones criminal behavior, the youth is placed at increasing risk for contact with the law. Fourth, the peer system is extremely influential in the life of an adolescent. The opinions and impressions of one’s peer group (e.g., attitudes toward criminal behavior) often rival those of the parents; negative peers are thus a potent risk factor for juvenile offending. Finally, the school system is also an important socializing agent, providing opportunities for structured prosocial activity, to learn life skills, and to develop positive relationships.
A Brief Overview of Youth Risk Instruments
Youth risk instruments tend to be downward extensions of the adult tools in which the item content is modified to reflect developmental considerations unique to adolescence. This practice reflects the fact that there are a number of risk factors for reoffending that are common to both youth and adults; however, youth are not mini-adults and differ in important ways as discussed earlier, which needs to be taken into consideration. For instance, special consideration may be given to items that concern school functioning (e.g., poor achievement, disruptive conduct) or parental relationships (e.g., lack of parental monitoring, volatile relations with one or more caregivers). Several risk assessment instruments have been developed to evaluate risk for reoffending in juvenile offenders. These measures tend to be clinical rating scales that are completed by trained justice system professionals (e.g., psychologists, youth probation officers, or treatment service providers). Such scales are a collection of markers shown by theory or research to predict reoffending (e.g., criminal history, negative peer group), usually organized in the form of a checklist of items that can be rated as present or absent or by degree of seriousness. Such checklists are usually a combination of static or stable (generally, historical unchanging) and dynamic (able to change, such as one’s peer group or attitudes) items. Scores on constituent items may be summed to yield a total score that often corresponds to risk levels of differing severity, usually a variation of low, medium, or high; there may be a specific cutoff, or depending on the scale, the assessor may derive a risk level through analysis of the pattern or configuration of items.
Some examples of well-known youth risk tools include the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory, Structured Assessment of Violence Risk for Youth (SAVRY), and the Violence Risk Scale–Youth Version. There is also a clinical checklist of problematic personal, emotional, and behavioral characteristics associated with antisocial behavior known as the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version, which is commonly used in juvenile risk assessment, although it was not developed to assess risk but rather features associated with psychopathy, so it is not a risk assessment tool per se. There is also a class of tools designed to assess risk for sexual reoffending among youths who have come in contact with the law for sexually intrusive behaviors (e.g., sexual assault of a younger child or peer, inappropriate sexual touching). Some examples of these include the Estimate of Risk for Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism and the Juvenile Sexual Offender Assessment Protocol–Second Version.
So, how do we know if these risk measures accurately assess risk? How do we know if youth who are actually at the greatest risk to reoffend are accurately identified by these assessments? These questions all pertain to a particularly important property of youth risk instruments (and risk instruments in general) referred to as predictive accuracy; that is, higher scores or higher risk ratings of the tool, indicating a more serious collection of risk factors and greater likelihood of reoffending, are associated with increased rates of reoffending.
There are a number of statistics used to evaluate predictive accuracy; some examples include the correlation coefficient and the area under the curve (AUC). Correlations range in value from −1.0 to +1.0; the higher the number, the stronger the association. Positive correlations indicate that increasing scores on the youth tool are associated with higher rates of reoffending. In the risk assessment field, one set of guidelines proposed that correlations of .10 be considered low or small, .24 moderate/medium, and .37 or greater large or high. The AUC statistic ranges from 0 to 1.0 with higher values indicating more accurate ability to discriminate recidivists from nonrecidivists; for instance, an AUC value of .70 indicates that there is a 70% chance that a random recidivist has a higher score on a risk tool than a randomly selected nonrecidivist. The interpretation guidelines mentioned earlier characterize AUC values of .56 to be low/small, .64 medium/moderate, and .71 or greater to be large or high.
With all of this said, a quantitative review of 49 youth recidivism studies that featured the SAVRY, Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (and other variations of this tool), and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version found that each tool predicted reoffending with moderate- to high-predictive accuracy. No single instrument was superior to the others in the prediction of recidivism, whether this was violent recidivism or general (i.e., any criminal behavior) recidivism. A further quantitative review of youth sexual offending risk instruments also found that tools such as the Estimate of Risk for Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism and Juvenile Sexual Offender Assessment Protocol second version had moderate- predictive accuracy for youth sexual offending.
Considerations in Selecting a Youth Risk Instrument
If the major youth risk instruments seem to predict recidivism equally well, how do we decide on which one to use? There are several factors to consider. First, there needs to be evidence that the instrument can predict the outcome of interest with at least reasonable accuracy, and thus validation research on youth samples, preferably with replication, is needed. When this has been achieved, a primary consideration becomes the general purpose of the risk assessment. For instance, if the goal of the assessment is to assess risk for general recidivism, the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory may be particularly appropriate; if the outcome is future violence, then the SAVRY or Violence Risk Scale–Youth Version might be appropriate; or if the young person happens to have committed a sexual offense, then the Juvenile Sexual Offender Assessment Protocol–Second Version or Estimate of Risk for Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism would be appropriate. Oftentimes, multiple instruments may be used (e.g., a general and a specific measure).
A further consideration is to remember the primary purpose of risk assessment: It is not about predicting whether or not a youth will reoffend in a certain way. Rather, risk assessment should be used to inform the nature and intensity of efforts that need to be taken to manage the youth’s risk so that the youth can be helped not to reoffend. What this means is youth with high scores should have more treatment, closer supervision in the community, stricter conditions (e.g., curfew) to help promote compliance, and engagement with multiple systems (e.g., supports for the school, family, and broader community) to help them remain offense-free if possible. Tools with dynamic factors can be critical in identifying problem areas that youth need to change, how much treatment they require, and what types of interventions to use.
Finally, all youths have positive qualities and assets to build, and it is important, wherever possible, to identify these and draw upon them in an effort to manage risk. Some of the tools mentioned earlier take strengths or protective factors into consideration (e.g., SAVRY). There are also special tools designed to assess protective factors directly such as the Structured Assessment of Protective Factors: Youth Version. Other tools such as the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version can be helpful in identifying special responsivity issues with which youth may present (e.g., tendency toward manipulation, lacking empathy) and can alert service providers to modify their treatment as needed to maximize gain.
References:
- Hoge, R. D., Guerrera, N. G., & Boxer, P. (2008). Treating the juvenile offender. New York, NY: Guilford.
- Olver, M. E., Stockdale, K. C., & Wormith, J. S. (2009). Risk assessment with young offenders: A meta-analysis of three assessment measures. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36, 329–353. doi:10.1177/0093854809331457
- Viljoen, J. L., Mordell, S., & Beneteau, J. L. (2012). Prediction of adolescent sexual reoffending: A meta-analysis of the J-SOAP-II, ERASOR, J-SORRAT-II, and Static-99. Law and Human Behavior, 36, 423–428. doi:10.1037/h0093938