User:Annfiles/sandbox

'''[notes from Tess: This was a good find and place to contribute, Angeline. Good work, overall. THere was one part where the word "actuarial" was necessary, and there were several fixes that needed to be made to the references. I fixed those on the wikipage - you can see in the view history section if you wish. Thank you for your contributions to this class and to Wikipedia!]'''

Reflist Bureau of Justice Assistance Risk Assessment in Criminal Sentencing Who performs risk assessment? COMPAS Software Recidivism Public Safety Assessment PSA Factors

Editing under "Fields of Application" in the "Risk Assessment" main article:

Law Risk assessments are used in numerous stages during the legal process and are developed to measure a wide variety of items, such as recidivism rates, potential pretrial issues, probation/parole, and to identify potential interventions for defendants.[64] Clinical psychologists, forensic psychologists, and other practitioners are responsible for conducting risk assessments [64,65,66]. Depending on the risk assessment tool, practitioners are required to gather a variety of background information on the defendant or individual being assessed. This information includes their previous criminal history (if applicable) and other records (i.e. Demographics, Education, Job Status, Medical History), which can be accessed through direct interview with the defendant or on-file records [64].

In the pre-trial stage, a widely used risk assessment tool is the Public Safety Assessment[69], which predicts failure to appear in court, likelihood of a new criminal arrest while on pretrial release, and likelihood of a new violent criminal arrest while on pretrial release. Multiple items are observed and taken into account based on which aspect of the PSA is being focused, and like all other risk assessments, each item is assigned a weighted amount to produce a final score[64]. Detailed information such as transparency on the items the PSA factors and how scores are distributed are accessible online[70].

For defendants who have been incarcerated, risk assessments are used to determine their likelihood of recidivism and inform sentence length decisions[68]. Risk assessments also aid parole/probation officers in determining the level of supervision a probationer should be subjected to and what interventions could be implemented to improve offender risk status[65]. The Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS)[67] is a risk assessment too designed to measure pretrial release risk, general recidivism risk, and violent recidivism risk. Detailed information on scoring and algorithms for COMPAS are not accessible to the general public.