Abstract
Various tools were designed to guide practitioners in the risk assessment of offenders, including the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI). This instrument is based on risk assessment principles prioritizing the actuarial approach to clinical judgment. However, the tool's architects allowed subjective judgment from the practitioners-referred to as clinical override-to modify an offender's risk category under certain circumstances. Few studies, however, have examined these circumstances. Therefore, the current study used decision tree analyses among a quasi-population of Quebec offenders (n = 15,744) to identify whether there are offenders more likely to be subjected to this discretion based on their characteristics. The results suggest that, although the override is rare, it occurred under few specific combinations of circumstances. More precisely, these findings propose that the utilization of the clinical override stems from a perceived discrepancy between risk prediction and management.
Highlights
Various tools were designed to guide practitioners in the risk assessment of offenders, including the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI)
These findings suggested that offenders who were subjected to a downward clinical override, compared to those subjected to an upward override, were more likely to be characterized by risk factors as portrayed by the LS/CMI
The override is rarely utilized by criminal justice practitioner (CJP) using the LS/CMI, the current investigation highlights that this discretion seems to occur in some specific circumstances which could be interpreted as the combination of hard facts and clinical judgment regarding the offender
Summary
Various tools were designed to guide practitioners in the risk assessment of offenders, including the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI) This instrument is based on risk assessment principles prioritizing the actuarial approach to clinical judgment. To support CJPs, tools based on the RNR model and principles have been developed, such as the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI; Andrews et al, 2004) This instrument is based on risk assessment principles prioritizing the actuarial assessment approach. Despite the instrument’s strong actuarial component, it allows, to some extent, the CJP’s subjective judgment This discretion, known as the clinical override, grants CJPs the possibility to reconsider an offender’s actuarial risk category in an upward or downward fashion. This form of discretionary power—focus of the current investigation—is, a compromise between actuarial and clinical approaches to risk
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