Recent stories in the media are raising important questions about whether risk and needs assessments are biased against people of color or women. As with all such tools, accuracy depends greatly on design and proper implementation.
If your agency is using a risk and needs assessment, you should know the tool is performing and develop a plan to remediate any issues (e.g., scoring inconsistencies or low predictive accuracy) you may discover.
1. Validate your assessment tool.
2. Assess quality of implementation of the risk and needs assessment tool.
3.Develop a plan to address any bias with the risk and needs assessment tool itself (e.g., current weighting of items is causing unintended bias) or how it is being implemented and used (e.g., it is not being scored correctly).