Title: The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment: Putting Gender at the Forefront of Actuarial Risk Assessment - Penal Reform International
Headings: The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment: Putting Gender at the Forefront of Actuarial Risk Assessment
The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment: Putting Gender at the Forefront of Actuarial Risk Assessment
Women have distinct pathways to offending to men, often marked by violence, abuse, trauma, mental illness and unhealthy relationships – all factors which translate into needs and risk factors for reoffending. However, traditional risk and need assessments are designed with male offenders in mind. This blog post by criminologists, Breanna Boppre and Emily Salisbury of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, summarises the gender-specific risk assessment that was designed specifically for women in the U.S. to bring gender to the foreground of offender rehabilitation.
The development of the WRNA: Starting from ‘women up’
More information
PRI’s work on gender-sensitive risk and needs asssessments
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Content: The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment: Putting Gender at the Forefront of Actuarial Risk Assessment - Penal Reform International
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The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment: Putting Gender at the Forefront of Actuarial Risk Assessment
Breanna Boppre & Emily Salisbury 12th April 2016
Women have distinct pathways to offending to men, often marked by violence, abuse, trauma, mental illness and unhealthy relationships – all factors which translate into needs and risk factors for reoffending. However, traditional risk and need assessments are designed with male offenders in mind. This blog post by criminologists, Breanna Boppre and Emily Salisbury of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, summarises the gender-specific risk assessment that was designed specifically for women in the U.S. to bring gender to the foreground of offender rehabilitation. Actuarial risk assessments are numerical scoring tools used to help correctional agencies classify, and consequently, place offenders into appropriate custody levels and relevant treatment programming based upon their predicted risk for misconduct or re-offending. Although women offenders comprise a small percentage of the prison population (7% in the U.S.), they are affected by 100% of the programs, policies, and practices in correctional facilities that were originally designed for male offenders. From a public safety perspective, it is crucial to use gender-responsive risk assessments that are created with women offenders’ social-psychological needs in mind. However, most traditional assessments were designed to predict men offenders’ antisocial behavior, and thus miss important women-specific risk factors associated with their re-offending. In the U.S., the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) partnered with Dr. Pat Van Voorhis at the University of Cincinnati to develop a suite of gender-responsive risk and needs assessment scoring tools to use with women offenders, known as the Women’s Risk Need Assessment (WRNA).