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Parole Board for Scotland: CORPORATE PLAN 2002
CHAPTER 4Parole Research
1. The primary consideration of the Parole Board for Scotland is risk of re-offending. The Board must therefore be sure that the decision-making process both minimises any risk to the public and respects the rights of the individual whose case it is considering. Ongoing research is, therefore, imperative to monitor the impact of parole on re-offending as well as the outcome of the Board's decisions to grant parole or not.
2. Past research into parole decision-making indicates that a lot of emphasis has been placed on the development of an appropriate statistical risk score to help the parole boards' measure the likelihood of re-offending. Early empirical research 1 on parole decision-making often focused on offence-related, socio-economic and institutional variables to construct scales that predicted parole outcome. However, there was often little agreement on the most important factors and so the scales constructed were of limited use. Variables such as age and index offence severity were generally associated with parole decisions; for example, younger offenders and those convicted of less serious offences often received the most favourable parole consideration.
3. The Carlisle Committee 2, reviewing the parole system in England and Wales recommended that the Parole Board, "should be under a duty to take into account statistical prediction techniques and, where appropriate, clinical assessments which will assist it in its work". The first risk predictor used in Parole Board decision making in England and Wales was the Reconviction Prediction Score (RPS) 3 which predicted the likelihood of a prisoner being convicted of a new offence within 2 years of release from prison. However, since its construction in 1960s, the predictive power of the RPS has been reduced, due in part to changes in the risk of reconviction caused by changes to the criminal justice system. Due to this problem of shrinkage, another instrument, the Risk Of Reconviction (ROR) 4, was developed using a sample of prisoners released in the late 1980s. The ROR had the advantage not only of being more up-to-date but also of providing a measure of risk over variable time periods and providing a risk measure based on only 6 variables: age at conviction, in years; number of youth custody sentences; number of adult custodial sentences; number of previous convictions.
4. A ROR score is no longer calculated for prisoners being considered for parole and its use was discontinued in the late 1990s. It was felt by the Parole Board in England and Wales (the ROR was never used in Scotland) that it provided little more than a starting point for consideration of risk. Furthermore, it was considered that the resources required to make the ROR calculations could no longer be justified, since the scores appeared to be given little weight in the decision-making process.
5. The most recent study on the parole system in England and Wales was conducted by Hood and Shute 5 and published in 2000. This study examined the parole decision-making process and the Parole Board's ability to differentiate between low and high risk offenders. The study demonstrated that the Parole Board's assessments of risk were higher than those arrived at using the ROR. Hood and Shute, therefore, concluded that the Board members were making "unduly pessimistic" clinical assessments and recommended that ROR scores should be calculated and considered by the Parole Board when making its decision about risk.
6. Given the conclusions which were been drawn by Hood and Shute, the Justice Department considered that it would be valuable to attempt some assessment of the efficacy of Parole Board decision making in Scotland. A research study was commissioned to explore recidivism rates among determinate sentence prisoners released on parole and those considered as presenting too great a risk to be paroled (and therefore released on non-parole licence at the two-thirds stage of sentence). The Parole Board for Scotland also appointed a sub-group of three members to discuss the way forward and to identify particular areas of interest for research. Board members were asked for comments and suggestions for research and this information was collated and presented as an extended research proposal document for consideration by the Central Research Unit.
7. In addition to comparing the release outcomes of these two groups of licensees, the research will attempt to identify the reasons for the Board's decision in cases where release on parole resulted in reconviction or failure (false-positive decisions) and cases where prisoners were refused parole but successfully completed their non-parole licences (false-negative decisions). A separate short research project will examine how the various reports and information contained in the parole dossier impact on the decision-making process. Some attempt will also be made to explore whether different Board members (males and females and members from different professional backgrounds) place different emphases on the information contained in the dossier.
8. The Parole Board for Scotland and the Justice Department have discussed also validating the Risk of Reconviction (ROR) score for use in Scotland. Before this score could be applied by the Parole Board in Scotland, it would be necessary to test whether, given the differences in our criminal justice system, the scoring system produces valid predictions of risk of reconviction in this jurisdiction. Validation of the ROR would be a substantial exercise and before such work could be undertaken it would have to be agreed that this type of statistical instrument could, potentially, make a contribution to decision making. An audit of risk assessment instruments currently in use in the Scottish criminal justice system has already commenced and, as part of this work, any existing evidence of the predictive efficacy of these statistical scores will be examined. This research will provide more information about the value of risk prediction instruments. When the findings from this research are known then the case for validating the ROR score for use in Scotland will be considered.
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