JOURNAL

10.1177/0886260504267740
Hanson
/ PROGRESS
OF INTERPERSON
IN VIOLENCE
AL VIOLENCE
RISK ASSESSMENT
/ February 2005

Twenty Years of Progress

in Violence Risk Assessment
R. KARL HANSON

Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada

Violence risk assessment has advanced considerably in the last 20 years. In the
1980s, leading professionals questioned the very possibility of valid violence risk
assessments; now, many of the major risk factors have been identified, and professional debate focuses on how best to combine these risk factors into meaningful evaluations. An important contributor to this advance in knowledge has been the rise of
meta-analytic reviews. Through quantitative summaries, the cumulative findings of
small, potentially insignificant studies have provided important answers to questions
concerning the effective assessment and treatment of violent offenders.
Keywords:

violence; risk prediction; meta-analysis

Assessing the risk of violence has always been one of the central tasks for
those involved in the management of offenders in the criminal justice and
mental health systems, but it has never been easy. As a doctoral student in
clinical psychology, I was taught that knowledge of recidivism prediction
was sufficiently poor that professionals should refrain from making longterm predictions. Short-term predictions of violence were permitted, not
because experts were substantially better at this task, but because the consequences of erroneous short-term predictions were more tolerable to the clients (e.g., they may stay an extra week in a hospital). Much of the pessimism
about risk assessment was derived from Monahans (1981) important monograph and the earlier study of the Baxstrom patients in which the sudden
release of dangerous psychiatric patients failed to produce the expected
carnage (Steadman & Cocozza, 1974).
It is still easy to find professionals who question the validity of risk assessments for violence, but the tone of the research literature has changed. Journals are now filled with articles in which long-term violent recidivism is predicted with moderate to high accuracy. Rather than questioning whether
Authors Note: The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily those of
Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada.
JOURNAL OF INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE, Vol. 20 No. 2, February 2005 212-217
DOI: 10.1177/0886260504267740
2005 Sage Publications

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violence can be predicted, researchers are debating the best methods of risk
assessment. Monahan and Steadman have even proposed their own approach
to violence risk assessment (Steadman et al., 2000).
This is a remarkable change. The progress in violence risk assessment has
been motivated, in part, by social policy in Canada and the United States that
has increasingly emphasized community safety as the fundamental goal of
intervention with offenders (Petrunik, 2003). The initial success of empirically based risk assessment was used to justify legislation that included riskbased decisions (e.g., dangerous offender designations in Canada;
postsentence detention of high-risk sexual offenders in the United States),
which, in turn, has encouraged further research on risk assessment. As a contributor to the risk research literature, I have come to expect courts to carefully scrutinize my work with lawyers alternately claiming that my work is
either accepted fact or the mushiest of pseudo-science.
The progress in violence prediction can also be attributed to the exceptional efforts of some very talented researchers. Robert Hares dogged efforts
to establish psychopathy as a reliable and valid clinical construct produced
the first big successes in violence risk prediction (e.g., Forth, Hart, & Hare,
1990). Harris, Rice, and Quinsey deserve much credit for documenting how
empirically derived combinations of common clinical variables can be used
to predict long-term violent recidivism (Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier,
1998). Their work builds upon a long tradition within criminology of using
actuarial instruments to predict general criminal recidivism (e.g., Burgess,
1928; Nuffield, 1982).
Another important group of contributors has been Andrews, Bonta, and
Gendreau who have emphasized the need to distinguish between types of risk
factors (e.g., Andrews & Bonta, 2003; Gendreau, Little, & Goggin, 1996).
Static, historical risk factors can be useful for the purpose of pure prediction,
but knowledge of dynamic (changeable) risk factors is required to know
where to intervene. The risk prediction instrument based on their social psychological model of crime, the Level of Service InventoryRevised (LSI-R;
Andrews & Bonta, 1995), is the most widely used and best validated measure
of general criminal recidivism.
The 1990s saw the rapid introduction of empirically based violence risk
assessment tools. These included structured professional guidelines (such as
the Historical, Clinical, Risk20 [HCR-20]; Webster, Douglas, Eaves, &
Hart, 1997) as well as fully actuarial measures (e.g., the Violence Risk
Appraisal Guide [VRAG]; Harris, Rice, & Quinsey, 1993). Specialized
measures were developed for subpopulations such as sexual offenders
(Epperson, Kaul, & Huot, 1995), wife assaulters (the Spousal Assault Risk
Assessment Guide; Kropp, Hart, Webster, & Eaves, 1999), young offenders

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(Hoge & Andrews, 2002), and young sexual offenders (Prentky, Harris,
Frizzell, & Righthand, 2000).
The validation research has typically found that all these measures show
moderate accuracy in predicting violent recidivism, the predictive accuracy
of the measures are similar, and all the measures are substantially correlated with each other. Knoner, Mills, and Reddon (in press) even found that
randomly selected items from commonly used risk scales (VRAG, LSI-R,
Psychopathy ChecklistRevised, General Statistical Information on Recidivism) predicted recidivism as well as the individual scales. The same variables tend to predict general recidivism and violent recidivism (Gendreau,
Goggin, & Smith, 2002; Kroner & Mills, 2001) as well as sexual recidivism
(Hanson & Bussire, 1998; Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2004). Sexual deviance, however, may be an exception in that it predicts sexual recidivism but
not other forms of criminal recidivism.
WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW

Although we know that these risk scales predict violence, we know less
about what they are measuring. One position is that they differentiate a persistently criminal subgroup (antisocial taxon) from normal offenders (Harris,
Rice, & Quinsey, 1994). The other dominant position, led by Andrews and
Bonta (2003), is that the scales identify conceptually distinct, but correlated,
risk factors thereby creating a continuum of risk potential. The resolution of
these positions is important for the evaluation of change (e.g., conditional
release decision, treatment outcome). For evaluators who perceive their role
as differentiating high-risk offenders from low-risk offenders, dynamic
(changeable) risk factors are only relevant for identifying the timing of
reoffending. In contrast, evaluators who believe that offenders can change
need to consider how changes on enduring risk factors should influence
medium- to long-term recidivism potential.
The available research suggests that potentially changeable factors (e.g.,
attitudes, lifestyle instability) contribute information to risk potential that is
not captured by purely static, historical factors (Beech, Fisher, & Thornton,
2003; Hanson & Harris, 2000; Mills, Kroner, & Hemmati, 2003). There is
also some evidence that changes on these criminogenic needs correspond
to changes in recidivism potential (Andrews & Bonta, 2003, pp. 249250; Beech, Erikson, Friendship, & Ditchfield, 2001; Marques, Day,
Wiederanders, & Nelson, 2002). There is much to learn, however, about
combining static and dynamic risk factors into an overall evaluation.

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LEARNING THROUGH META-ANALYSIS

The major methodological innovation in the last 20 years has been the
routine use of quantitative summaries of research findings. Quantitative summaries of single studies were used in the early 20th century by Karl Pearson
and Ronald Fisher (Olkin, 1995), but it was not until Glasss (1976) study of
psychotherapy outcome that the term meta-analysis was introduced to the
professional literature and caught the attention of social scientists (Hunt,
1997). The results of a single study can be interesting, but increased confidence can be placed in the results when the same relationships are found in
many studies. Consequently, it is not surprising that meta-analysis is now the
accepted method of answering questions concerning the magnitude and
direction of empirical relationships (Cooper, 2003).
In the field of crime and violence, meta-analyses have answered important
questions concerning the effectiveness of correctional treatment (Andrews
et al., 1990) and the prediction of recidivism among general offenders
(Gendreau et al., 1996), mentally disordered offenders (Bonta, Law, &
Hanson, 1998), and sexual offenders (Hanson & Bussire, 1998). Whenever
they are available, meta-analyses should be the starting point for researchers
and policy makers wishing to learn about the empirical findings in particular
subject areas. When researchers do not have access to a meta-analysis of previous research, they should conduct one prior to conducting a new study.
Science is a social activity. Unfortunately, students in most research methods courses are only taught how to conduct single studies and do not learn
how to statistically compare their findings to the findings of other researchers. Not surprisingly, journals are filled with tests of the null hypothesis
(which is never true) and neglect more useful statistics such as effect sizes
and confidence intervals. Progress during the next 20 years will be accelerated as individual researchers increasingly think like meta-analysts and routinely consider their findings as only one addition to cumulative knowledge
(Lau, Schmid, & Chalmers, 1995).
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R. Karl Hanson completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of
Waterloo (Ontario) in 1986 after which he conducted clinical work with offenders for the
Ontario Ministry of Correctional Services and the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. Since
1991, he has been a senior research officer with Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada, specializing in research on sexual offenders and abusive men.