ReviewJournal of criminal justice
The predictive performance of criminal risk assessment tools used at sentencing: Systematic review of validation studies.
Review in Journal of criminal justice. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Are risk assessment tools more accurate than unstructured judgments in predicting violent, any, and sexual offending? A meta-analysis of direct comparison studies.Behavioral sciences & the lawPooled it
- Judgments of predictability, preventability and causation of mental health homicides in England 2010 - 2023.Medicine, science, and the law · 2026Article
- Dynamic prediction of reoffending in individuals given community sentences: Development and validation of a novel risk monitoring assessment tool (oxMore).Law and human behavior · 2026Article
- Assessing the Dimensional Structure and Measurement Invariance of STABLE-2007 Scores in a California Sample of Adult Men on Parole for Sex Crimes.Sexual offending (Trier, Germany) · 2026Article
- Reliability and Validity of Risk Assessment Tools for Violent Extremism: A Systematic Review.Campbell systematic reviews · 2025Review
- Bias in AI systems: integrating formal and socio-technical approaches.Frontiers in big data · 2025Review
- Prediction of violent reoffending in people released from prison in England: External validation study of a risk assessment tool (OxRec).Journal of criminal justice · 2023Article
- Integrating static and modifiable risk factors in violence risk assessment for forensic psychiatric patients: a feasibility study of FoVOx.Nordic journal of psychiatry · 2023Article
- Towards a More Evidence-Based Risk Assessment for People in the Criminal Justice System: the Case of OxRec in the Netherlands.European journal on criminal policy and research · 2022Article
- Predicting Violent Reoffending in Individuals Released From Prison in a Lower-Middle-Income Country: A Validation of OxRec in Tajikistan.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although risk assessment tools have been widely used to inform sentencing decisions, there is uncertainty about the extent and quality of evidence of their predictive performance when validated in new samples. Following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review of validation studies of 11 commonly used risk assessment tools for sentencing. We identified 36 studies with 597,665 participants, among which were 27 independent validation studies with 177,711 individuals. Overall, the predictive performance of the included risk assessment tools was mixed, and ranged from poor to moderate. Tool performance was typically overestimated in studies with smaller sample sizes or studies in which tool developers were co-authors. Most studies only reported area under the curve (AUC), which ranged from 0.57 to 0.75 in independent studies with more than 500 participants. The majority did not report key performance measures, such as calibration and rates of false positives and negatives. In addition, most validation studies had a high risk of bias, partly due to inappropriate analytical approach used. We conclude that the research priority is for future investigations to address the key methodological shortcomings identified in this review, and policy makers should enable this research. More sufficiently powered independent validation studies are necessary.
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