Advancing the Performance and Cultural Sensitivity in Risk and Needs Assessments for Sexual Offending among American Indian and Alaskan Native Populations

The Urban Institute, together with its partners, the National American Indian Court Judges Association (NAICJA) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), aims to develop and validate a dynamic sexual recidivism risk assessment scale for AI/AN individuals. The applicant will work with criminal justice agencies in eight states to compile a sample of 40,000 to 50,000 sex offenders, of whom approximately 3,000 will be AI/AN. In doing so, they propose to amass the largest and most diverse database ever created on AI/AN individuals with sexual offenses, as well as the largest database ever constructed on a U.S. sex offender population. The applicant will construct and validate a new assessment scale that incorporates static and dynamic factors predictive of sexual reoffending among the AI/AN population, evaluate the predictive performance and cultural sensitivity of the new scale in each of the partnering sites, develop a new actuarial prototype to integrate the assessed risk and needs of individuals into an actionable “responsivity” scale that informs targeted supervision and treatment planning, and assess implementation challenges through a pilot that tests the effectiveness of the risk scale in select study sites and tribal communities as well as the efficacy of adopting the risk and responsivity scales.
ca/ncf