Optimising the risk assessment of violent recidivism on release from prison: a retrospective cohort investigation
In England and Wales, it is currently estimated that one in four individuals convicted of a serious violent offence will re-offend within two-years.
In the Criminal Justice System, risk assessment tools are used identify who is at high risk for reoffending and this informs sentencing, supervision, and rehabilitation approaches.
Currently the performance of these resource-intensive tools is less than optimal. As reoffending patterns change it is important to keep updating these tools and testing new risk factors.
Emerging evidence suggests that some educational factors are associated with violent offending and so might help improve the predictability of violence risk assessment tools.
The Oxford risk of Recidivism tool (OxRec) is a 14-item evidence-based, open access online risk assessment tool. It was developed using Swedish population register information to estimate the risk of violent recidivism in individuals released from prison and has been tested on probationers in the Netherlands where the tool is used.
As the tool shows good predictive ability, is free to use and takes only 10 minutes to complete using routinely available information there is potential for it to be considered as a cross-agency violence recidivism risk assessment tool in England and Wales.
To date, it has been tested on a small number of individuals using Thames Valley police records, but validation in a larger and nationally representative sample of released prisoners in England and Wales is required.
This work is supported by Administrative Data Research UK, an Economic and Social Research Council investment (part of UK Research and Innovation). [Grant number: ES/Z503162/1]
Aims
Using a large cohort of released prisoners in England and Wales this proposed project aims to
- Examine the early educational factors are associated with violent recidivism
- Externally validate a prediction model for violent reoffending (OxRec)
- Examine the extent to which the identified educational risk factors further improve the performance of the OxRec tool in predicting violent recidivism.
Methods
Our study cohort will be established from the prison discharge dataset and consist of individuals born on or after 31 August 1985 up to and including 31 August 2000 who were subsequently released from prison between January 2008 and December 2019.
Information on these individuals’ prior offending and violent recidivism following release from prison will be established from the Police National Computer database and confirmed using the prison reception and population datasets.
By using these prison release dates, each prisoner can be followed up from date of release until the first violent recidivism event occurs or the study ends (December 2021).
The education history of these prisoners will be examined using the National Pupil database, which has already been linked to crime records. Criminogenic and non-criminogenic factors related to recidivism will be described using information taken from the Offender Assessment System (OASys) risk assessment.
Using a type of time-to-event analysis, we will examine whether educational factors are associated with 1-year and 2-year violent recidivism (aim 1), we will then test whether the OxRec tool is generalisable to the England and Wales prisoner population (aim 2) and whether adding educational factors to the OxRec has the potential to improve its predictability (aim 3).
Impact
Establishing whether early education variables are associated with violent recidivism among released prisoners has the potential to improve violence risk assessment tools’ predictive performance; to support critically informed professional judgement and decision making in the Criminal justice system; and to promote the importance of early childhood interventions at a public health level
Principal Investigator
Senior Lecturer
Investigator
Lecturer in Psychology