ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the various approaches to violence risk decision making and provides an overview of several popular risk assessment instruments and guides for this area of practice. Instruments that assess risk of violence are used by psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, and criminologists to inform decisions about civil commitments, parole and probation, community supervision, and release from psychiatric hospitals or correctional facilities. The development and implementation of empirically driven, clinically effective violence risk assessment instruments are of vital importance. The risks, criminogenic needs, and strengths from the risk-need-responsivity model roughly correspond to static risk factors, dynamic risk factors, and protective factors, respectively. The chapter examines an overview of some of the most commonly used second- and third-generation violence risk assessment instruments and guides. The original version of the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide was developed based on a sample of 618 male offenders, more than half of whom had been admitted to psychiatric hospital in Canada.
