Compare and contrast the actuarial and structured professional judgment approaches to violence risk assessment. Discuss the usefulness of each approach to decision-makers in the legal and correctional...

Running Head: Violence Risk Assessment 1
Violence Risk Assessment Methods- A Comparative Study
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Violence Risk Assessment 2
Introduction
Risk assessment is a broader term which pertains to the entire process of speculating
in an intelligent manner of the probability of violent acts a person can commit and the steps
which can be taken to prevent those acts of violence. Experts define risk beyond probability
having subjective aspects to it like nature, gravity and proximity and occurrence.
Violence has a much broader definition as compared to the much prevalent meaning in
regular circumstances. It is actually attempt or a threat of physical assault a person inflicts
upon other individual which is intentional and not consensual and results into physical,
mental trauma or sexual injury. It may or may not involve a weapon of injury and can be
direct or conspired. (Kettles, Gass, Addo, M and Mckie, A. 2009)
Violence risk assessment pertains to an activity applicable to score of legal and
clinical circumstances. It is a clinical activity which has questionable soundness and legal
reliability. The field has seen empirical success due to conceptual and procedural progresses
over the long period of time. There are many techniques by which risk associated with the
person accused of the violence in past or a totally new specimen. The research and
development in the field of risk assessment have been going on an advanced pace because of
continuing incidences associated with violence, physical assault leading to numerous deaths
because of these incidences. The demand for reliable and empirically valid techniques of
violence assessment had been huge owing to need gap of these techniques for legal and
correction frameworks. The primary focus of all these techniques is not only to prediction of
associating probability of violence with a particular person but also to actually prevent them
from happening in future by devising methods to reduce the risk associated. The process of
assessment does not end after knowing the risk percentage but it actually goes till the risk is
reduced for a certain situation. There are four main models or methods if risk assessment:
Violence Risk Assessment 3
Actuarial method, Anamnestic method, Clinical method and Structured method. Kriegman,
D. (2007)
Prediction Based Methods
Prediction of any event requires some amount of numerical means to appraise and equate
precisions. The test should be modified to increase its accuracy, sensitivity without worsening
specificity. Prediction methods can only be applied to binary outcomes, for example
predicting which group of offenders will commit the crime again. Predictive accuracy which
is attained by static and antique variables poses a considerable amount of limitations of
variance for assessments of dynamic variables such as mood of the offender, insight and
attitudes. (Litwack, Groscup, and Hart, 2006)
Actuarial Method
This method of risk assessment is basically a form of prediction based technique. It is
actually designed to make a prediction of particular behaviour in a definite time setting. The
theoretical goal of this method is to actually predict the act of violence on a relative basis
which means on the premise that there is a test specimen or a subject and a control group or
reference group which follows certain norms. Also, it predicts the probability of act of
violence in absolute sense by giving accurate estimate if plausibility of violence in future.
The main drawbacks of these methods have with respect to the accuracy of prediction. It is
also seen that these methods lack generalizability to the entire set of people under test and
excludes low base rate and is rigid in its approach. (Heilbrun, K. 1997)
Prevention Based Methods
These...