Risk Assessments, are evaluations of persons, used by the Criminal Justice and Mental Health systems of society. These assessments are being used with respect to Sex Offenders, BOTH, in prison before release, and, sometimes in society with respect to sex offender registration.

The purpose of assessments is to determine the likelihood of re-offense. However, society has automatically equated re-offense TO dangerousness in error. Legislatures have done nothing to correct that error, or to, define the purpose of assessments in a manner which society will understand. Accordingly, legislatures foster the dangerousness theory by ommission!

It is critical for society to be aware of the processes government uses to find persons dangerous. Whether legislatures simply declare a person (or group) as dangerous, or whether legislatures require local agencies to use a reliable validated risk assessment system. Society needs to know, that what is being done, is both, constitutional and reliable, to ensure the safety and rights of all concerned.

Everyone needs to understand Government authorized Risk Assessment systems! Throughtout history governing bodies have used dangerousness as the reason to commit atrocities by virtue of race, disability, nationality, etc. Risk assessments, need to be fair, standardized and validated, to prevent abuses!

Today, prior sex offenders, tomorrow, WHO? It would be shocking to have some official come to your door saying, we have a court order to lock you up, and this being the first time you have heard anything! Then, constitutional protections would clearly have meaning to everyone!

Our research was too large to put on one page, there are five sections.
THIS IS THE -OVERVIEW- Each block below permits you access a different section.

Beyond declaring/predicting sex offenders, as DANGEROUS, is the PROCESS, METHOD and TOOLS used to accomplish the risk assessment. If society is to feel safe then the tools must be reliable, and have to be validated so that they produce results that are correct.

We are going to review, A layman understanding of a risk assessment process, and the result it arrives at [low-medium-high risk: Likelihood of re-offense]. Society has equated the likelihood of re-offense as the dangerousness of the offender, and the equation is incorrect. How risk assessment systems are used, the methods employed and who performs the assessment are all covered. Finally, how often are risk assessments correct?

Courts have held they are WRONG 66% of the time. They are incorrect in the sense of OVERPREDICTION, meaning, many who are declared dangerous, really are not! Further, many of the systems in use today have no appeal process, so the public cannot be made aware of the truth behind risk assessments!

We have gathered several reports of actual risk assessment tools in use today and have provided links directly to those reports and descriptions. Unfortunately not all are available on the Internet. Then we have prepared a state-by-state list of risk assessment systems used by those states.

One of the major failures of "Risk Assessment Systems," is that they don't go beyond the -Likelihood of Reoffense Factor- and INSERT a -Community Concern Factor-, which could be inserted with information readily available.

To understand what we call, the Community-Concern-Factor see:
Sex Offender Registration: The Truth About Recidivism Rates.