Sexual recidivism: A review of static, dynamic and actuarial predictors

Abstract

The need for accurate risk assessment of sexual offence recidivism has never been greater. It is widely accepted that actuarial risk instruments outperform clinical judgement and the literature has recently witnessed a surge of empirically derived actuarial measures. However, in spite of the increased levels of predictive accuracy, actuarial measures have been criticized as being unrepresentative, lacking specificity, and being heavily reliant on static risk factors without taking into account dynamic risk, psychological emotional states and treatment effects. Rather than offering a critique of the actuarial movement, this paper offers a summary of static and dynamic risk factors associated with sexual offence recidivism as identified from the literature. Implications of incorporating dynamic factors into risk assessments and actuarial measures are discussed.

Keywords:

• Sexual offenders
• actuarial risk assessment
• static and dynamic risk factors

Notes

Psychopathy measured using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist – Revised (PCL-R, Hare, 1991).

Factor 1 consists of aspects of personality associated with psychopathy such as affective and interpersonal style, i.e. glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, arrogance, lacking empathy or remorse. Factor 2 consists of antisocial and irresponsible socially deviant behaviours including impulsivity, criminal versatility, many short-term relationships, and adult and adolescent antisocial behaviour (Hare, 1991).

Survival analysis is a statistical technique used to determine the average time spent in the community prior to recidivating, given certain predictor variables and controlling for unequal time to fail.

The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC): Plotting the data points for the “hit rate” against the “false alarm rate” produces a curve (area under curve: AUC) from which the hit rate can be calculated as a function of the false alarm rate. The trade-off between the hit rate and the false alarm rate is called the Receiver Operating Characteristic (for a more detailed discussion on using the Receiver Operating Characteristic in measuring actuarial predictive accuracy see Craig, Browne, Stringer, & Beech, 2003c; Prentky & Burgess, 2000).