Collection of approaches and best practices on using risk and needs assessment information at sentencing across European jurisdictions

The current report of R4JUST aims at collecting the approaches and best practices on using risk and needs assessment information at sentencing. While the initial focus, as stated in the project application was on European Jurisdictions, the scarce scientific research in the topic led the authors to widen the geographic scope and include contributions from outside Europe (mostly from the U.S.). The report starts by exploring the well-established Risk-Need-Responsitivity Model (chapter 6), followed by a collection of empirical evidence on the use of risk and needs assessment tool at the sentencing stage (chapter 7). This collection of studies then led to the mapping of existing risk/needs assessment tools (chapter 8) with a focus on the ones that have been applied more extensively and therefore produced more data that can be used to conjecture about its potential use at the sentencing stage. Chapter 9 problematise the use of this tools for sentencing purposes and reflects on the topic of radicalised/terrorist offenders and the tools available for these defendants, arguing that generic tools used for non-terrorist offender might not be appropriate for this population. Conclusion (chapter 10) are then presented and confronted with reviewed literature. Main conclusions are that: (1) risk/needs assessment tools are widely used and recommended; (2) they allow a usually fast evaluation of the offender bringing insights for different stages (such as sentencing, rehabilitation, parole); (3) the sole use of these tools (particularly actuarial tools) for sentencing purposes is not recommended.