Chapter 2 The development of OASys Supervision and sentence planning This includes: ! outline plan, for use with PSRs only ! initial plan ! review plan, including transfer and termination ! request for information sheet. Offender self-assessment This is a questionnaire to give the offender an opportunity to record their views. Risk of reconviction and offending-related factors The main body of OASys consists of 12 sections each relating to different offending-related factors. Research has demonstrated that each of these areas is closely related to risk of reconviction. Most sections contain both dynamic and historic data.
There are questions at the end of each section that allow the assessor to link the offending-related factors to the risk of serious harm, risks to the individual and other risks, and offending behaviour. The risk factors vary in how well they predict reconviction, so the contribution each factor makes to the overall reconviction score is weighted to take this into account when producing the risk needs profile. For example, the criminal history section is highly predictive of reconviction, so is given a large weighting, whereas emotional wellbeing is less predictive of general re-offending and so given a smaller weighting .
Section 1, historic and current data relating to criminal history and current offending, is static data and will rarely change during the period of supervision. Section 2, analysis of offences, contains a great deal of historical, therefore static, data about the offence circumstances, but also contains elements that assess the offender’s attitude to their victims, and acceptance of responsibility for their offending, which will vary during a period of supervision. The remaining sections all contain more dynamic elements than static markers. Researchers have divided these dynamic factors in a number of ways, but OASys divides them into two groups.
The first relates to the offender’s current situation influenced by the wider environment such as employment and accommodation, where the offender’s prospects are affected by local and national underlying trends. The second includes aspects of the offender’s personality, attitudes and behaviours that are causally linked to offending. These personal factors may account for a particular offender’s propensity to offend, but they are often the underlying reasons for the offender’s difficulties in many other areas of life. OASys Manual V2 © Crown Copyright 2002 Page 12