Assessing Risk and Recidivism in African Americans

Abstract

In this chapter, we have discussed many of the common measures used to assess risk for reoffending. As mentioned, it is interesting to note that many of the measures discussed were not specifically researched with regards to performance among different ethnic and racial groups, especially in light of the disproportionate representation of African Americans incarcerated as compared to the number of African Americans who make up the US population. However, in spite of the specific research related to racial and ethnic characteristics of these measures, the majority of them included African Americans in their normative sample, and yielded good predictive validity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)