The effort to “Maximize client freedom and contribute to safer communities through better prediction, changing and understanding of criminal behavior” is accomplished through two lines of research.
The purpose of the first line of research is to integrate professional and offender information into transition assessments that will account for risk, readiness, and engagement.
The participatory component allows for the client to have a meaningful role in contributing to the transition assessment. The assessment of risk involves an instrument directly assessing risk levels and the perceived level of risk of the client. Thus, the risk perception of the client can contribute to the determination of overall risk. Readiness involves assessing the context to which the client is transitioning and assessing the difficult areas that the client self-predicts. Engagement in the transition process involves assessing the styles of engagement and, from the client perspective, assessing the positive/strength factors that keep the client crime free (desistance). These desistance factors assist to fully engage the client in the transition.
The purpose of the second line of research is understanding what can result in change and when a client has changed sufficiently to warrant a transition. This involves isolating and integrating reliable mechanisms of change. These empirically derived mechanisms of change focus on who can change, facilitating assessments that are more idiographic.
Treatment Change and Mental Illness. This project examines the conditions that contribute to treatment engagement in intervention programs addressing mental illness among criminal justice involved persons.
The V Level risk assessment project. Typically risk assessment assign clients to high, moderate, and low categories. What these three categories represent can vary. The V Level project provides a common language framework for interpreting risk assessment instruments.