A conceptual kaleidoscope: contemplating ‘dynamic structural risk’ and an uncoupling of risk from need

ABSTRACT

Recent calls for ‘evidence-based’ approaches have firmly positioned risk assessment as a promising path towards more efficient, unbiased, and empirically based offender management, in custody and in the community. Simultaneously, sociological and critical legal scholars have questioned the focus on individual needs at the expense of wider structural factors’. I will demonstrate the need to reconceptualise risk/need logics and the use of ‘evidence’. I will argue that various criminal justice processes are themselves dynamic criminogenic risks that produce systemic conditions for recidivism and which, if modified, could make a measurable difference in recidivism and other correctional efficiencies. Finally, I will argue that the logic of dynamic risk is transferable to an analysis of socio-structural factors, and that this characterisation can alter the framing of penal subjects, governmental responsibilities, and potentially interrupt the systemically produced criminogenic pathways that perpetuate criminal involvement and marginalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Criminogenic need
• dynamic risk
• gender
• race
• punishment
• correctional intervention

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tony Ward, Philip Goodman, Linn Clark, and reviewers for their instructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The book Psychology of Criminal Conduct (Andrews & Bonta, 1994/2010) has been revised on several occasions (1998, 2003, 2006, 2010).

2 For example, a robust debate has focused on the nuances of general personality and cognitive social learning theories, which inform offender rehabilitation (see e.g. Polaschek, 2012).