The Duties of a Forensic Psychologist

That's a great question. One that I'm not sure I can answer that well but certainly there are some decent questions and controversies surrounding risk assessments.

One argument might be that forming a risk assessment from current data is difficult since there are some innate biases against certain groups of people who are more frequently arrested than others.

"young black and brown men are at a higher risk of arrest. It is well documented that communities of color are over-represented in the criminal justice system compared to their percentage of the population. And of course, being arrested doesn’t mean you actually committed a crime."

The above question and quote I found in an article which I think can answer your question much more ably than can I.

I'll summarise some of the points and also post a link to the article at the end so that you can discover some of the issues with risk assessment.

1. One of the first points made by the article (Lacambra, Gillula and Williams, 2018)

is that any tool like risk assessment is prone to subjectivity and thus is prone to the same flaws in any system human beings create due to human judgments and mental heuristics.

2. Another pretty convincing blow is the nature of how we exactly calculate the risk of recidivism. There is no set and bulletproof way of doing so.

3. I'll quote directly from the article here because it's worded really well and I don't want to spoil it:

"risk assessment tools typically assign predictive scores to individual candidates based on a comparison with the past behavior of other people. Judging a person’s future behavior by comparing their history to the past actions of others like them flouts our basic notions of individual merit and fairness."

Now despite these shortcomings,needs the authors do suggest that there may be ways of improving risk assessments, for instance by opening these tests up to scientific criticism. This can be achieved by having independent scientific advisors without governmental oversight.

Also, the way these tests are put together need to be accessible and not hidden away so that again peer-testing and peer review can take place.

Conclusions:

From this briefest of looks, and I certainly would need to look at risk assessments more closely, it seems to be a case that while risk assessments can be used there is a lot of work to make them fairer, and more reliable. I know next to nothing about risk assessments so look forward to learning about them more.

Lacambra, S. Gillula, J. Williams, J. 'Recidivism Risk Assessments Won’t Fix the Criminal Justice System' [URL] Link: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/recidivism-risk-assessments-wont-fix-criminal-justice-system

Briliant points about the complexity of the roles that forensic psychologists actually do. There's also some huge responsibilities regarding the assessment of risk for offenders.

Thanks for sharing