Interestingly, the recent pieces of legislation which have strengthened arrangements to protect the public from 'dangerous' people do not speak of dangerousness, preferring instead to identify the type of people likely to be dangerous (for example 'sexual and violent offenders') and to indicate the nature of the risk they present (a 'serious risk of harm to the public'). As with so much work with offenders, the issue lies not in splitting hairs but in being clear about meaning and about meaning in action - its practical implications in prison and beyond. Since it is becoming the basis of prison and probation risk assessment, the definition of a serious risk of harm used by the offender assessment system (OASys) is a useful starting point:
a risk which is life threatening and/or traumatic and from which recovery, whether physical or psychological can be expected to be difficult or impossible.
But the more conscious we become of potential risks or ‘danger’ (and the media can and does raise the profile of potentiality by sensationally reporting the lurid facts of actuality), the more anxious we become. In research published in 1998, Professor Hazel Kemshall (who writes for this edition (pages 2-5) observed that consequently our world seems ‘more hostile, hazardous and uncertain’. Although improved risk assessment has led to better risk management, expectations outstrip what is practicable: even the best risk assessment tool is only 60 per cent accurate; and offending behaviour programmes help reduce risk not eliminate it altogether.
The best assessments of risks are based upon previous behaviour - hence the importance of pre-convictions as a determinant of the likelihood of future offending. Yet the Home Office Police Research Series (144, published last year) showed that 32 per cent those convicted of murder and 36 per cent of those convicted of serious sexual offences had no previous convictions. When we add to this the fact that the vast majority of murders and sexual offences are committed by someone known by the victims, the demons so often used to portray the perpetrators of serious crimes are also seen as unhelpful. This is not to diminish the horror and the tragedy of some crimes (especially as we await the outcome of due process in the cases at Walton-on-Thames and at Soham); nor is it to devalue risk assessment but to highlight its limitations. The only way to eliminate risk altogether is to introduce restrictions on human rights which would be not merely illiberal but unacceptably authoritarian.
Therefore, in order that risk assessment and risk management become as effective as they can be we must take the trouble to ‘unpack’ the terminology, strip ‘danger’ of its hype but without underestimating risk and the robustness with which it must be managed. The concept of ‘vivid’ danger or risk which was conceived as long ago as 1983 can help. In this concept risk is understood in terms of its seriousness, frequency and immediacy, and qualified by certainty. Taking this further, the analysis of most serious risk will show that it is not ‘one thing’ but a complex of interwoven motives and possibilities. Each of these are given impetus and made possible or less likely by a range of factors: the presence or absence of housing, employment, basic social skills, family and friends. To these must be added the presence or absence of characteristic traits and of personal habits which may either help inhibit or potentiate the risk: impulsivity, anger and addiction, for example.
It is upon such complex issues that every risk assessment turns: the one whether the lifer can be trusted as a ‘red band’, or the young offender on temporary release, or the serious offender on parole. However sure one may feel having assessed the risk, allowing a margin of error, a risk will remain. Managing ‘dangerousness’ therefore has a great deal to do with managing uncertainties. In a climate in which the public is made more sensitive to danger by the frequency and immediacy with which it is reported, managing risk is hard. Add to this the certainty with which the media ‘autopsy’ is conducted using the exact science of hindsight, we must be wary of becoming too risk averse. Real rigour is needed in assessing risk and a demonstrable reasonableness and robustness in the way it is managed.
