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Washington State Institute for Public Policy

All of WSIPP's research is published on our website. The Publications page includes every report we've released—from our founding in 1983 to the present. Each report entry includes the title, publication date, abstract, any available supplemental materials, and a downloadable PDF.

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Publications

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Washington's Offender Accountability Act: An Evaluation of the Department of Corrections' Risk Management Identification System (Archived)

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Steve Aos - January 2002

In 1999, the Legislature passed the Offender Accountability Act (OAA). Fundamentally, the OAA concerns economics; that is, it affects how the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) spends its budget. It directs DOC to focus more resources on higher-risk offenders and - because state agency budgets must balance - to spend fewer dollars on lower-risk offenders. The Institute was directed by the Legislature to “conduct a study of the effect of the use of community custody…on recidivism and other outcomes.” In this report, we evaluate the implementation of one cornerstone of the OAA: the formal process DOC is using to assess the risk levels of offenders - DOC’s “Risk Management Identification” (RMI) system. This report tests the degree to which the RMI system measures what the Legislature intended. We analyzed the first substantial group of offenders classified by DOC. We found that DOC’s RMI system does a reasonable job of classifying offenders pursuant to the policy directives of the OAA.

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