Murder and Serious Sexual Assault - Lancaster EPrints - Lancaster ...

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Applying the results
What can risk assessment professionals and other agencies take away from these
findings? The analyses illustrate risk in terms of how much more likely certain
offenders (those who possess certain types of previous convictions) are to be
convicted of murder or SSA, compared with other offenders. Although many of the
relative risks are statistically significant, the extent to which they are useful for
practitioners working in real world settings may at first seem more restricted. A
good number of these findings indicate that many categories of conviction carry
only a slightly enhanced risk of subsequent serious offending (greater than one, but
less than twice as likely to receive a subsequent conviction for murder or a serious
sexual offence than a general offender).
For example, knowing that a person with a conviction for robbery or assaults with
intent is just over one and a half times as likely to be convicted for SSA compared
with an offender who has no such convictions is of limited value to practitioners
(despite the fact that it is a statistically significant result). Principally this is
because, in spite of increased risk due to the presence of certain previous
convictions, the vast majority of the many offenders with these convictions do not
go on to commit serious offences.
Even for those ‘unusual’ previous convictions that indicate a relatively high
likelihood of future conviction for a more serious offence, the absolute risk of
offending seems low. In other words, the likelihood that one particular offender with
a high risk conviction will go on to commit a target offence is low; for example,
robbery had a relative risk of 2.27, but the absolute risk of someone with this offence
going on to be convicted of murder is low, at around one in 526 (see Appendix B).
There are, nevertheless, several very practical applications arising from this study.
As other commentators have observed, the present trend is towards a more
preventative approach to serious offending, with the introduction of measures
designed primarily to protect the public (Maguire, Kemshall, Noakes, Wincup and
Sharpe, 2001). Examples of recent legislative provisions to effectively manage
offenders in the community include the introduction of the sex offender register
under the Sex Offenders Act 1997, and the use of Sex Offender Orders under the
Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (Kemshall, 2001). Several of these approaches benefit
by being informed from this study, and in particular, that we can make more
informed judgements about broad groups of offenders whose criminal convictions
suggest higher levels of relative risk of future serious offending.
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