L’évaluation des facteurs de protection à l’aide de la SAPROF

Abstract

Risk assessment has greatly changed over the last 40 years. It has moved from a strictly clinical procedure based on clinical judgement, to a structured approach based on scientific literature. While the main goal of first generation structured methods was to estimate the probability of recidivism, we are increasingly interested in knowing more about the reasons that push delinquents to commit new crimes in order to properly intervene and treat the causes at hand. The last generations of instruments now aim to estimate intervention needs and guide rehabilitation practices. Although practitioners largely resort to protective factors to establish avenues to work on, no tool was available until recently to systematically evaluate protective factors. The present article proposes a description of the different measurement and conceptualization issues surrounding protective factors, in addition to addressing the nature of the effect of these factors on recidivism. This paper describes The Structured Assessment of Protective Factors for Violence Risk (SAPROF), a structural professional judgement tool that focus solely on protective factors for violence risk. The SAPROF investigates internal, motivation and external protective factors and has incremental validity over risk assessment instruments. The paper also discusses validation results of the SAPROF, as well as its limitations. The paper finally addresses the crucial question of interfacing risk and protective factors when it comes to estimating the risk for recidivism.