Rachel Horan PERU Associate Researcher and Director of the Averment Group along with PERU’s Kevin Wong and Kirstine Szifris set out the case for operationalising risk needs and responsivity (RNR) and desistance principles in their newly published paper on the Enablers of Change needs assessment tool.


Their paper in the European Journal of Probation consider the constructs that underpin the tool developed by Interserve, which run five Community Rehabilitation Companies in England. They identify points of departure and similarity between RNR principles (Andrews and Bonta, 2007), the ‘good lives’ model (Ward and Maruna, 2007) and desistance principles (McNeil and Weaver, 2010) and their integration. They examine how these constructs have been operationalised in the tool, which aims to assess needs, strengths, protective factors and contribute to risk assessment.

The full article can be found here.