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78 Fed. Probation 3 (2014)
Reconsidering the Responsbility Principle: A Way to Move Forward

handle is hein.journals/fedpro78 and id is 59 raw text is: September 2014 3 Pricpe A Wa toM v Frad Guy Bourgon James Bonta Public Safety Canada THE RISK-NEED-RESPONSIVITY (RNR) model has arguably become the premier model of offender assessment and rehabilitation (Cullen, 2012; Ogloff & Davis, 2004; Polaschek, 2012). The RNR model made its published debut in 1990 (Andrews, Bonta, & Hoge, 1990), with the first empirical test of the principles published a few months later (Andrews, Zinger, Hoge, Bonta, Gendreau, & Cullen, 1990). In the Andrews, Bonta and Hoge paper, four principles were presented with respect to offender treatment. The first three principles dealt with the who, what, and how of offender rehabilitation. The risk principle stated that the intensity of treatment should be matched to the risk level of the offender, with the greatest amount of treatment services being directed to the higher-risk offender. The need principle dictated that treatment goals should be the criminogenic needs that are functionally related to criminal behavior. The responsivity principle directed service providers to use cognitive-behavioral techniques to bring about change while being attentive to individual factors such as personality, gender, and motivation. The fourth principle was the override principle, which called for professional discretion in cases where behavior could not be explained with existing knowledge. Since 1990 the RNR model has expanded to include many more principles (Andrews & Bonta, 2010a; 2010b), but the principles of risk, need, and responsivity remain at the core. Most of the research has focused on the risk and need principles, while the research on the responsivity principle has been a poor cousin. There are many reasons for this situation, two of which are the ease of conducting research on risk and need compared to responsivity and the vagueness of the original conceptualization of responsivity by Andrews, Bonta, and Hoge (1990). In this paper, we attempt to improve our understanding of the responsivity principle and provide suggestions to furthering research on responsivity. First, however, we summarize the impact of the RNR model on correctional practice. Next, we trace the history of the RNR model with special emphasis on the responsivity principle. Following this discussion, we review how the responsivity principle has come to mean simply a consideration of client characteristics in the absence of the environment where the work takes place, such as therapist/helper characteristics and skills. We then end the article with a discussion of how we can forward a constructive research agenda on the responsivity principle. The Impact of the RNR Model on Correctional Practice Today, the research support for the RNR model goes far beyond a handful of studies. There is such a breadth of research on the principles as they apply to offender assessment and treatment that meta-analytic reviews of the evidence are common. With respect to RNR-based offender assessment, we have the Level of Service (LS) family of instruments such as the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R; Andrews & Bonta, 1995) and the Level of Service Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI; Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2004). Meta-analyses of the LS literature have found the instruments to predict both general and violent recidivism (Campbell, French, & Gendreau, 2009; Gendreau, Goggin, & Smith, 2002; Olver, Stockdale, & Wormith, 2014) and prison misconducts (Gendreau, Goggin, & Law, 1997). Additional quantitative reviews of the instruments have found them applicable to women (Smith, Cullen, & Latessa, 2009) and Aboriginal offenders (Wilson & Gutierrez, 2014). In a recent meta-analysis by Bonta, Blais, and Wilson (2014), the risk-need domains measured by the LS instruments were predictive of both general and violent recidivism for mentally disordered offenders. With such evidence, the LS instruments have become the most widely used offender risk/ need instruments in the United States (Vose, Cullen, & Smith, 2008), Canada (Wormith, Ferguson, & Bonta, 2013) and internationally (Bonta & Wormith, in press). Turning to the rehabilitation literature, support for the risk principle can be found in the meta-analysis by Andrews and Dowden (2006). Over 200 treatment studies produced 374 unique effect size estimates. As expected, the mean effect size was .03 with lower-risk cases; delivering treatment services to low- risk offenders has little impact on recidivism. Treatment for higher-risk offenders yielded a mean effect size of .10. Although the meta- analysis showed only a modest effect of treatment with higher-risk cases, the authors hypothesized that this may have been due *Correspondence addressed to Guy Bourgon, Public Safety Canada, 340 Laurier Ave. W, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, KIA 0P8. Telephone: 613-991-2033. FAX: 613- 990-8295. Email: Guy.Bourgon@ps.gc.ca. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views of Public Safety Canada.

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