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Research Summary:Issues of safety and screening for potential violence are particularly salient in community correctional settings. These contexts require a risk assessment mechanism that can both classify offenders according to their risk of violent recidivism and be administered quickly and effectively by nonclinicians. Existing assessment instruments such as the LSI-R, PCL-R-2, VRAG, and HCR-20 are of limited utility in relation to predicting violence in community corrections. This research describes the creation and validation of the Violence Risk Screening Instrument that better meets the requirements of community corrections. Violent recidivism among men was best predicted by a three-item instrument consisting of Severe Violence, Domestic Violence, and Unstable Lifestyle. Policy Implications:Balancing the treatment and supervision needs of offenders with the task of ensuring public safety within a context of limited resources makes risk assessment and triage essential. Resource constraints mean that not all offenders can receive high levels of supervision; similarly, best practice research on responsivity suggests that only those offenders at higher risk will benefit from high levels of supervision (Andrews and Bonta, 1994). In the past two decades, the use of risk assessment instruments has brought greater objectivity to the process of classifying offenders into risk groups. However, a single risk assessment instrument cannot classify offenders according to all forms of risk. As supervision strategies become more precise and more focused on specific forms of risk, so too must the instruments that are used to derive the classification. The Violence Risk Screening Instrument proposed here is valuable insofar as it meets the requisite criteria for community corrections: It has demonstrable predictive utility, and it can be administered

State juvenile correctional agencies are not identical in terms of their structure and policies, making interpretation of national custody data difficult. Without a detailed understanding of these nuances and the ability to categorize states into analogous groups, differences among state custody statistics are difficult to interpret. To address the challenges inherent in compiling national data, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency surveyed each state with regard to policies, decision-making processes, and details about the various components of the justice system, including courts, detention, commitment facilities, and aftercare, all of which have a profound effect on admission rates, offense profiles, and average lengths of stay.