ABSTRACT
The Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) Model first emerged out of Canada in the 1980s, during the heyday of the “nothing works” pessimism around rehabilitation. In the wonderful phrase of Canadian Stephen Duguid (2000), its emergence was like “a cold wind from the North” sweeping across North America and later to Europe and beyond. In this chapter and the next we shall describe the RNR Model in depth and then systematically evaluate it utilizing the epistemic (epistemological) criteria outlined in the previous chapter. However, it is first necessary to discuss briefly the concepts of risk, need and responsivity, since any evaluation of the RNR Model hinges on how these concepts are interpreted.
