In order to understand how actuarial and structured professional judgment (SPJ) methods contribute to the assessment of violence risk recidivism, one must firstly consider the connotation of the two techniques. To begin with, actuarial methods refer to a statistical paradigm of assessing risk using historical information in the context of precarious individuals in the context of a forensic setting (Brown & Campbell, 2014). This method requires no subjective clinical contribution and relies on static algorithms. SPJ instruments use an amalgamation of clinical judgement and actuarial or static algorithms of evaluation (Bouch, 2002), on the basis of past and present idiosyncratic information regarding the patient, through subjective appraisal
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Meta-analytic reviews suggest through contradictory and conflicting evidence, that there is a diversified view of actuarial risk assessments amongst different types of patients, (Singh et al, 2010). For example the validity has been questioned internationally in a study of 244 male psychiatric patients in Belgium, whereby the VRAG was successful in identifying low risk individuals, but failed to identify violent recidivists (Heesch et al, 2016). Nevertheless, evidence strongly suggests that actuarial methods of assessment carry an abundance of validity and inter-rater reliability (Edens et al, 2016), hence, are arguably valuable to criminal justice …show more content…
However, it has been argued that whereas the actuarial assessment is used for future risk prediction, the HCR-20 V3 is rather a means of “risk management” (Kemshall, 2002). This finding was validated in a study on forensic psychiatric patients in Denmark, which demonstrated that HCR-20’s predictive validity was not as strong as in past empirical studies; the authors suggest that the HCR-20 is better suited for risk management purposes as opposed to specific predictive recidivism (Liselotte et al, 2011). Conversely, many studies have established good predictive validity within different contexts, for example patients discharged from medium secure hospitals in the UK (Doyle et al, 2014), and civil psychiatric patients (Strub, 2014). There is a pronounced emphasis on ascertaining the reasons why a risk may be established, as opposed to simply identifying a
Meta-analytic reviews suggest through contradictory and conflicting evidence, that there is a diversified view of actuarial risk assessments amongst different types of patients, (Singh et al, 2010). For example the validity has been questioned internationally in a study of 244 male psychiatric patients in Belgium, whereby the VRAG was successful in identifying low risk individuals, but failed to identify violent recidivists (Heesch et al, 2016). Nevertheless, evidence strongly suggests that actuarial methods of assessment carry an abundance of validity and inter-rater reliability (Edens et al, 2016), hence, are arguably valuable to criminal justice …show more content…
However, it has been argued that whereas the actuarial assessment is used for future risk prediction, the HCR-20 V3 is rather a means of “risk management” (Kemshall, 2002). This finding was validated in a study on forensic psychiatric patients in Denmark, which demonstrated that HCR-20’s predictive validity was not as strong as in past empirical studies; the authors suggest that the HCR-20 is better suited for risk management purposes as opposed to specific predictive recidivism (Liselotte et al, 2011). Conversely, many studies have established good predictive validity within different contexts, for example patients discharged from medium secure hospitals in the UK (Doyle et al, 2014), and civil psychiatric patients (Strub, 2014). There is a pronounced emphasis on ascertaining the reasons why a risk may be established, as opposed to simply identifying a