Project Description:

The Women’s Risk Needs Assessment (WRNA), an instrument that appropriately accounts for women’s risk and need, has been applied nationally and internationally for assessment and case planning with women who are at various points of involvement with the correctional system, from pretrial to community supervision. The project is a continuation of funding from FY 2022 for work that addresses the need for creating a national marketing, training, and technical assistance strategy for the WRNA.

 

Abstract:

Despite there being nearly 50 years of research supporting the need to have correctional approaches that are specific to women (Van Voorhis, 2012), and recent calls for equity in services for justice-involved women as opposed to exactly the same services for women as men (Buell & Abbate, 2020), several myths continue to persist among the correctional field. The shift from a one-size-fits-all treatment approach to a gender-responsive one is filled with the misperception that doing so “coddles” women while not holding them accountable. There are also many misperceptions about gender-responsive risk/needs assessment among the correctional academic discipline. Namely, that instruments deemed ‘gender-neutral’ are just as effective for justice-involved women as they are for men. These instruments (e.g., LS/CMI, ORAS, etc.) are not actually ‘neutral’ upon careful examination, even though they have demonstrated predictive validity among female populations. Importantly, just because an instrument is valid does not mean it is working as well as it could be if it had been designed for women at the outset, similar to the Women’s Risk Needs Assessment (WRNA).

The project is a continuation of funding from FY 2022 for work that addresses the need for creating a national marketing, training, and technical assistance strategy for the WRNA. The four central goals for Year 2, the Utah Criminal Justice Center (UCJC) will:

1. Continue coaching and implementation strategies for adoption of the WRNA with the five selected community corrections sites from Year 1.
2. Deliver presentations to national and local conferences on the WRNA’s goals and purposes.
3. Develop small scale data collection and research protocols with sites from Year 1.
4. Create both a national WRNA learning community with stand-alone booster sessions and a Diversity Review Team (DiveRT) to assess the WRNA’s cultural competency for women of color.

 

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For more information, contact emily.salisbury@utah.edu

 

 

 

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