The RisCanvi: a new tool for assessing risk for violence in prison and recidivism

ANTONIO ANDRÉS PUEYO; KARIN ARBACH; SANTIAGO REDONDO ILLESCAS

Handbook of recidivism risk assessment

Wiley-Blackwell

Año: 2018;

The ?prison bubble? phenomenon (Petersilia, 2011) is not exclusive to the U.S. In many ways,it also applies to the significant increase in the number of people incarcerated during the last25 years in Europe. Many Western European countries, especially the U.K., France, and Spain,have been witness to a trend similar to that seen in the U.S., though admittedly not on thesame scale (Aebi et al., 2014). It has been well documented that the presence of a large prisonpopulation pushes up the rates of recidivism (Petersilia, 2003; Zara & Farrington, 2016). In thischapter, we will examine the issue of prison recidivism in Catalonia, briefly summarize thestudies of recidivism carried out in recent years, and present our instrument for assessingthe risk of recidivism, the Risc Canvi (RisCanvi) or ?Risk Change? protocol, which has madean important contribution to the management and rehabilitation of offenders in the Catalanprison system. The RisCanvi was designed to assess the risk of violence in prisons in Cataloniaand, since 2009, it has been the main tool both for preventing prison violence and for managingrehabilitation and recidivism. It has been empirically tested and its metric parameters aresimilar to those of other recidivism risk assessment tools like the Level of Service Inventory?Revised (LSI-R) and Post-Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA) (see Desmarais & Singh, 2013).