Offender Risk Assessment Practices Vary across Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The dominant Canadian approach to offender rehabilitation, the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) model, requires assessing offenders' likelihood of recidivism and their criminogenic needs (i.e., risk/need assessments). The current study examines the risk/need assessments routinely used in Canadian corrections and compares their risk category labels. All Canadian jurisdictions used a risk/need tool for general recidivism, most used sex-crime-specific tools, and a few used tools specific to intimate partner violence. There was, however, considerable diversity in the names, number, and meaning of the risk category labels, which could result in different responses to the same individual based solely on the version of the risk tool used in any specific jurisdiction. Our results suggest that increased attention to the meaning of risk category labels could facilitate offenders receiving the most appropriate and fair correctional responses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".