Assessing Recidivism Risk Across Female Pathways to Crime

Abstract

Actuarial tools, such as the Level of Supervision Inventory—Revised (LSI‐R), are regularly used to classify offenders as “high,” “medium,” and “low” recidivism risks. Its supporters argue the theory upon which the LSI‐R rests (i.e., social learning theory) accounts for criminal behavior among men and women. In short, the LSI‐R is gender‐neutral. Feminist criminologists question the LSI‐R’s validity for female offender populations, especially women under community supervision. Guided by Daly’s ( 1992 Daly, K. 1992. Women’s pathways to felony court: Feminist theories of lawbreaking and problems of representation. Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies, 2: 11–52. [Google Scholar] , 1994 Daly, K. 1994. Gender, crime, and punishment, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar] ) pathways to crime framework, we use a sample of women under community supervision in Minnesota and Oregon to evaluate the LSI‐R’s performance across offender subgroups. The results show that the LSI‐R misclassifies a significant portion of socially and economically marginalized women with gendered offending contexts. Predictive accuracy was observed for women who did not follow gendered pathways into criminality, whose offending context was similar to males, and who occupied a relatively advantaged social location.