The Development Of Risk Assessment Scale For Criminals

Analyzing and evaluating characteristics of criminals’ behavior accurately,preventing the risk of violent crime,escape and suicide effectively, are tremendous challenges facing by prison officers.In this study with 1830 new imprisoned criminals as subjects, a preliminary risk assessment scale of criminals in prison is developed.The research includes three aspects: first, on the basis of the existing related research at home and abroad for reference, combining with the results of the interview with prison officers, risk assessment scales,which are conducted by officers and criminals themselves,have been developed.and the reliability and validity of scales have been tested; Second, the levels of risk have been graded,and the integration of scales has been considered carefully;Third, the official risk self-assessment scales have been used as the tools to check the highly dangerous detection rate, and the distribution characteristics of criminals risk relating to demographic variables have been demonst rated in the study.The main results obtained are as follows:1.The risk assessment scale of criminals in prison is divided into self-rating scale and his-rating scale.The self-rating scale has a total of nine dimensions,including antisocial personality,paranoid-personality,impulsive-personality,borderline-personalit-y depression, manic,neurotic,psychotic symptoms and lying.His-rating scale contains a total of 44 items,respectively criminal experience,performance in the prison,substance dependence and social support systems.2. The items of the scale has good discrimination and popular levels.The reliability analysis shows that the intend consistency coefficient of self-rating scale and his-rating scale is 0.93 and 0.90,and the test-retest reliability is 0.87.Confirmatory factor analysis results of fit indices : χ2/df=3.22 shows good model can accept,NNFT,CFI,GFI are great than 0.80,RESEA=0.068,show that the fitting is very good.The exploratory factor analysis of his-rating scale showed that four factors be extracted,can explained 51.59% of total variance.Thoes also shows that the prison risk assessment scale of the criminals has high reliability and validity, which can be used to assess the risk of the criminal in prison.3.The risk assessment scale of criminals in prison has three levels,namely highrisk,moderate risk and low risk.And the applied research shows that the high-risk detection rate of the risk of violence,escaping danger,self-harm and suicide in prison is between 9.8% and 12%.4.The survey study shows that three different age range of prisoners to exist significant differences in depression and psychotic.Meanwhile,there are significant differences between different academic in neurotic.