Women's Risk Needs Assessment Project
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Assessments

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The women’s assessments provide the following features:

• Seamless assessment models: Developmental teams and focus groups recommended seamless models, or assessments that could be used across different correctional agencies, in ways that would facilitate continuity of care through key transition points (e.g., incarceration, release to parole).

• Assistance to case managers and treatment planners: The instruments facilitate the work of gender-responsive programming by assisting correctional professionals in their efforts to match services to needs that are most relevant to women offenders. The assessments also continue to assess gender-neutral risk factors such as: 1) antisocial attitudes; 2) antisocial associates; 3) poverty; 4) education; 5) employment; and 6) substance abuse.

• Specific assessment criteria: Assessment items are behavioral in nature, thereby requiring few subjective judgments of test administrators. For example, items on the abuse scale do not ask whether offenders were abused, but rather whether and to what extent they were subjected to hitting, humiliation, threats or other actual abusive incidents.

• A gender-responsive focus: Several scales that are common to many current risk/needs assessments (accommodations, mental illness, financial circumstance, and family issues) are contextualized in gender-responsive terms.

• A focus on strengths: All of the instruments assess strengths, including self-efficacy, family support, educational assets, and parental involvement.

Figure 1, below, shows the assessment scales provided in each of the assessments. Although, each instrument assesses the same needs, their contribution to risk scores varies somewhat across different correctional populations. A scale is considered a risk factor if it: a) is related to institutional misconducts among prisoners; or b) is related to recidivism among parolees or probationers. In this way, a risk prediction is created for each offender through the addition of individual scores for each of the risk factors followed by the subtraction of scores for each of the strengths (Section I). Needs identified under Section II are assessed to provide additional information to case managers, with the understanding that they could be risk factors upon transition to another correctional environment.

Figure 1, also lists some scales in italics. These are scales that produced inconclusive results in research conducted to date. Either, they were found to be predictive in some samples but not others, or in the case of the pre-release sample, were not tested in an optimal setting. They are undergoing further research at the present time, but are nevertheless retained, because they showed promising results in at least one study.

The procedures for administering the new assessments vary somewhat according to whether an agency is using the full, stand-alone Women’s Risk/Needs Assessment or the Women’s Supplemental Risk/Needs Assessment in concert with an established gender-neutral risk assessment.

The stand alone assessment is administered through:

• A 30 to 45 minute interview designed by the NIC/UC project;

• A paper and pencil self report survey that requires a maximum of 30 minutes for offenders to complete. This survey may also be read to offenders who have difficulty reading. Also a product of the NIC/UC project, the survey includes scales pertaining to self-efficacy, parental stress, relationship dysfunction, and abuse;

• A scoring process which may be completed either by hand or by programming the scoring algorithms into various agency software programs. Software programs are not provided by UC or NIC at the present time.

The supplemental assessment involves:

• Administration of the LSI-R, Northpointe COMPAS, or other gender-neutral risk/needs assessment tool;

• A shorter interview of approximately 20 minutes, developed by the NIC/UC project, and tapping only gender-responsive items;

• The same self-report survey as used for the stand alone instrument;

• A scoring process which may either add the NIC women’s scales to the gender-neutral scales for a composite risk score or use the supplemental assessment as a stand-alone needs assessment instrument.

Because the core intent of the women’s assessments is to improve case management tasks of linking women to relevant programs and services, the assessments also furnish treatment and programming recommendations.