Strengths Matter: Evidence From Five Separate Cohorts of Justice-Involved Youth and Adults Across North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the predictive validity of criminogenic needs and strengths as measured by the Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument (YASI) and the Service Planning Instrument (SPIn) within five different samples from Canada and the United States spanning 6,445 justice-involved youths and 46,127 adults (combined N = 52,572). Dynamic strengths consistently increased predictive accuracy beyond dynamic criminogenic needs. Furthermore, in a Canadian community adult sample ( N = 20,537), strengths attenuated recidivism rates in lower- and moderate-need-level groups but had no impact among higher-need-level groups. Relatedly, in an American, federal re-entry adult residential sample ( N = 23,615), strengths attenuated program completion success rates across all need levels, albeit the effect was slightly more pronounced in the lower- and moderate-need groups. Thus, dynamic strengths are more than merely the absence of dynamic criminogenic needs and should be actively considered during case management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".