Perfect Community Correction Risk Assessment Thinking

Community correction is an important step towards China’s penalty mitigation, which embodies the socialization and individualization of penalty. In countries like the UK, USA, and Canada, community correction systems, having been explored and practiced for dozens of years, are relatively complete. However, they still can not totally prevent correction objects from recommitting crimes. Community correction risk assessment refers to evaluating the possibility of correction objects’recidivism during the term of community correction. The purpose of the assessment is, through risk evaluation, to scientifically quantify correction objects’personal danger and recidivism possibility and accurately analyze risk degree of their recidivism. Effective risk assessment can help to reasonably and effectively allocate community resources, and help to pay more attention to those correction objects with relatively low safety factor value. As a result, recidivism risk can be decreased, and correction quality can be improved. With the establishment and improvement of community correction system in China, more offenders with non-prison sentences will be given to communities for correction. The increasing difficulty in supervising correction objects has made community correction risk assessment an urgent issue that needs to be dealt with. Risk assessment started relatively early in study of prison execution, and the related theory is relatively mature. However, community correction has not been comprehensively carried out for a long time, so some factors constrain risk evaluation work, such as incomplete related laws and regulations, non-uniform evaluation scales, inefficient evaluation methods, low quality of evaluators. In the experimental work of community correction, Shanghai and Beijing took the lead to carry out risk assessment and make the evaluation scale. Some achievements have been made, but the evaluation scale needs to be further improved. It is not scientific to adopt the same risk evaluation scale in different evaluation stages, for persons serving different sentences, and for juvenile delinquents. The key point in scale design is the selection of evaluation factors. This dissertation, on the basis of analyzing key points of evaluation in different evaluation stages, comparing personal danger of persons serving different sentences, summarizing characteristics of juvenile delinquents, puts forward that scale making should be well-targeted, and tries to select relevant evaluation factors to design simple evaluation scales for the pre-correction stage and for juvenile delinquents.(value-setting and stage-division are not covered in the dissertation since they are too professional) In addition, in evaluation scale making, evaluator quality in China should be considered and proper evaluation methods should be adopted. Statistical evaluation method and clinical evaluation method are the two methods widely-adopted by countries whose community correction development level is relatively high. In countries such as the UK and USA, the relevant system is relatively complete. However, we can not totally copy their systems since in China we do not have uniform scales, and evaluator quality is relatively low. We should draw on their experience and adopt the part that fits us. This dissertation holds that statistical evaluation method should be applied under the premise condition of making uniform evaluation scales, clinical evaluation method should exert its effect on the basis of improving evaluator quality, widely absorbing professionals to participate, and the use of intuition method should be combined with the situation of China and in a properly limited manner.