Psychometric Issues in SVP Risk Assessment

Abstract

Predicting individuals' risk of recidivism is important for treatment, supervision, and public safety. It is critical in the United States, where courts use risk predictions to determine if sex offenders should be committed as sexually violent persons (SVPs). This chapter considers major psychometric issues in sex offender risk assessment that have emerged in the published literature, professional gatherings, online forums, and forensic practice. SVP risk assessment is based on sexual recidivism actuarial scales, such as the Static-99R and the Violence Risk Scale—Sexual Offender Version (VRS-SO). The chapter emphasizes the Static-99R and the VRS-SO, but the issues extend to other actuarial scales, such as the Static-2002R. An ongoing issue in SVP assessment is whether risk assessment is prediction. The issue is important because true and false positives and the statistics based on them are widely used to predict risk throughout the biomedical and behavioral sciences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)