Recently, Attorney General Holder attracted a lot of attention with a speech which raised his concern that perhaps the risk & needs assessment movement may not be a panacea.

Melissa Hamilton (University of Houston Law Center) has posted Risk and Needs Assessment: Constitutional and Ethical Challenges on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Across jurisdictions, the criminal justice system is enamored with the evidence-based practices movement. The idea is to utilize the best scientific data to identify and classify individuals based on their potential future risk of reoffending, and then to manage offender populations according to risk and criminogenic needs. Risk-needs tools now inform a variety of criminal justice decisions, ranging from pre-trial outcomes, to sentencing, to post-conviction supervision. While evidence-based methodologies are widely exalted as representing best practices, constitutional and moral objections have been raised. Risk-needs tools incorporate a host of constitutionally and morally sensitive factors, such as demographic and other immutable characteristics. The constitutional analysis herein engages equal protection, prisoners’ rights, due process, and sentencing law.