ABSTRACT
The growing penal policy focus on risk and public protection across the major Anglophone jurisdictions from the 1990s onwards saw increased attention to formal assessment in order to improve the targeting of scarce resources according to risk, and to improve the effectiveness of interventions (see Bonta and Andrews, this volume). By drawing on practice in the English and Welsh probation service as the primary exemplar, this chapter reviews the role of risk, needs and strengths in the assessment and supervision of offenders, outlining key developments from the early domination of the risk-need-responsivity model to the more recent impact of the ‘Good Lives Model’.
