Essentially, unstructured assessment involves interviewing people and trying to get an understanding of how they behave, and why. From this, one tries to make a judgement about how likely it is they will reoffend. Unstructured assessments may be based not only on interviews, but also consideration of psychological test results, staff information, the individual’s history, etc. The assumption is that professionals have skills based on years of experience and can apply these to predicting future behaviour. There are four main flaws in this approach:
Unstructured assessment is very labour intensive, as a great deal of time is required to conduct it properly. It is very inaccurate: in terms of predicting reconviction, most research studies suggest that it is about as accurate as tossing a coin. Tossing a coin is a great deal cheaper. Some of the most important published studies are: Meehl (1954), Quinsey and Maguire (1986), Hanson and Bussière (1998), Hanson and Morton-Bourgon (2004, 2005, 2008) To sum up, there may be many reasons for conducting a clinical assessment of someone, but risk assessment is not one of them. The whole approach is much too subjective, and allows for personal prejudices or ignorance to affect professional judgement. For example, it is commonplace in probation reports to see that sex offenders against children within the family described as a danger to all children. In fact, intrafamilial sex offenders have the lowest rate reconviction of any type of sex offender, and many pose little risk to anyone outside the family. Their level of risk is generally low, but the moral panic associated with any offences against children ensures that they are usually assessed as being high risk in unstructured assessments. |