As the future belongs to the predictive law enforcement the Ohio Risk Assessment System (ORAS) comes to answer the necessity of modern assessing instruments and tools for the fulfillment of this demand and to facilitate the communications between the agencies of the criminal justice system across the state. According to Eduard Latessa the assessment tools had to be predictive of recidivism at every point of the criminal justice system and to follow its stages: pretrial, community supervision; the intake in the correctional institutions and the community entry. (Latessa, E., et al, 2010, p. 16) ORAS was developed to assess and classify the level of the risk among the offenders who were in the system and also it had to identify the criminogenic necessities and the obstacles to programming. In order the agencies can use the tools of assessment properly the principles of useful classification had to be developed especially in regard to high risk perpetrators. The principle for evaluating the risk affirms that the correctional interferences and programs are most beneficial when their intensity corresponds to the risk level of the offenders.
Four assessment tools are constructed and validated through this study: the Pretrial Assessment tool (PAT); the Community Supervision Tool (CST); the Prison Intake Tool (PIT) and the Reentry Tool (RT). (Ibid, p. 17) To complete the study, lots of perpetrators across the states were interviewed for potential risk factors and were followed within a year to register all official data for recidivism.
The necessary for the study data was collected through using instruments as “self-report questionnaire and semi-structured interviews.” (Ibid) The ORAS includes a number of assessment tools that are able to evaluate the risk of recidivism at every point of the criminal justice system. The results of the validation are encouraging and they are able to make the difference between the risk levels.
After assessing the tools that ORAS provides, it can be concluded that the advantages of this systems gives to the law enforcement a powerful tool that will help not only to predict the risk levels of recidivism but also to program all necessary measures and treatment needs to prevent it. Maybe the biggest advantage that ORAS provides is the improvement in the communications between the different sections of the system, decreasing the costs and the excessive work that results from doubling the functions of the agencies.
References
Latessa, E., Lemke, R., Makarios, M., Smith, P. & Lowencamp, C., The Creation and Validation of the Ohio Risk Assessment System, Federal Probation, 2010, Vol. 74, No. 1, Print
