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Record W1544730641

The Risky Business of Risk Assessment

2002· article· en· W1544730641 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueHecate · 2002
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPrisonCriminologyRisk assessmentProject commissioningSociologyPsychologyPublishingPolitical sciencePublic relationsLawEconomicsManagement
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Correctional authorities in many Canadian provinces and territories are utilizing actuarial risk assessment procedures with criminalized adults and youth within their jurisdictions. Although some highly problematic philosophical issues and extremely challenging practical problems have been created by attempts to adapt imperfect models of risk assessment(s) designed for adults to the circumstances of youth, there is virtually no research regarding the appropriateness of applying such approaches to youth. This is especially the case when one considers the circumstances of some of our most marginalized young people. This article is a shortened version of a paper presented to the Women in Prison Conference in Brisbane in November 2001. It highlights some of the major challenges and critical issues regarding the use of actuarial instruments. Since there is very little material that directly addresses the issues raised by, or the results of applying, these sorts of assessment approaches to youth, much of it involves analysis and discussion of existing research and writing on the subject. In addition, the following discussion includes extrapolations and application of existing analyses and research results to the most marginalized groups of those who are criminalized. The longer version also focuses upon the circumstances of several young women who have been identified as some of the most `criminal' and `violent' youth in Canada by the systems that attempt to control them. Given the realities and normal range of phases of adolescent development, it would be the rare young person who would not be assessed as challenging authority, under-employed, sexually experimenting, et cetera. In short, it would be the unusual teen whose actuarially assessed risk would be non-existent. The most reliable way to predict which young people will likely be assessed as high risk by actuarial risk assessment tools designed for adults, whether or not they have been adapted for use with/on youth, is first to assess or categorize them on the basis of their respective degrees of disadvantage and marginalization. Contextualizing the Issues The proposed changes to the juvenile justice system, the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YGJA), particularly the provisions related to moving youth into the adult system, embody many tensions, some of which will be discussed later. On the one hand, the YGJA renders more procedurally and substantively stringent the test as to which young people will be subjected to the adult system. On the other hand, once relegated to that system, all privacy protections are stripped away, thereby reducing future rehabilitative and reform prospects. This reality is perhaps best exemplified by an examination of some actual cases. To this end, I am appending The Story of K. I also recommend that the situations surrounding transfer applications involving other young people be examined and analyzed in light of the foregoing. The few with which I have been directly involved place the system in sharp relief and reflect the glare of race and class bias. One exception is J.W., a young racialized woman charged with murder, whose counsel conducted a relatively exhaustive review of the deficits of the adult correctional system to which the prosetutorial team wished to see her transferred. Other young, racialized, and disabled women who have been targeted for transfer have not been able to escape the adult system. J.W. was not transferred and has therefore never been identified publicly. She has, however, been provided with opportunities for growth and development, as opposed to regression, thanks to the particular interventions of her family and some very committed staff within the youth justice system. The results of the positive, racially-cognizant, youth-directed, and supported approaches she experienced are underscored by her current reality. As I write this, J. is preparing for her final classes and examinations to complete her third year of university. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.934
Threshold uncertainty score0.989

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.324
Teacher spread0.293 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it