Quality and quality assurance in reporting practice relevant to criminal law

Criminal risk and criminal responsibility assessment reports are of public and sociopolitical concern, not least due to their impact on explosive decisions, entailing serious consequences, such as offender sentencing or endangerment of victims. As the empirical literature points to a heterogeneous quality of these assessment reports in practice, measures regarding quality assurance, such as the publication of methodological minimum requirements for criminal risk and responsibility assessments were introduced. Recent studies of an iterative research project on the basis of more than 1000 retrospectively analyzed criminal risk and responsibility assessment reports provide empirical data about an increasing standardization and implementation of these standards in general practice. Nevertheless, the quality of reports still appears to be relatively heterogeneous. The study results demonstrate the positive impact of quality assurance measures on the quality of assessment reports, although such guidelines do not necessarily show timely effects across institutions. Furthermore, the requesting party and the comprehensiveness of the judicial orders may have an impact on the quality of assessments and as such, there is potential for improvement on their side as well. On the one hand, the results indicate a (partial) positive effect in terms of quality improvement but on the other hand more steps need to be taken to ensure high quality risk and responsibility assessment reports.