During the 50th Annual Conference of the International Community Corrections Association (ICCA) in Cleveland, Ohio, Dismas Charities Executive Vice President Jan M. Kempf and Dr. David Robinson, President and CEO of Orbis Partners, Inc. provided the most recent research regarding the risk needs and strength assessment used by Dismas. Collectively, Kempf and Robinson have nearly 50 years of criminal justice experience. Over the past 10 years Dismas has devoted efforts to the implementation of risk, needs and strengths assessment to augment case planning across its numerous re-entry facilities in the United States. An innovative feature of the model is the incorporation of client strengths within the assessment process using the Service Planning Instrument (SPIn), developed by Orbis. At the same time, Dismas also focused on developing a state-of-the-art client information management system (FreshStart) to collect relevant information for managing their re-entry population. During the workshop, Kempf and Robinson described the information resulting from these innovations. They also explored some of the key results of analyses of two large databases from assessments, and shared their findings about changes in re-entry populations. The lectures provided new knowledge showing that measuring strengths provides key predictive information to inform case planning for offenders in the re-entry process.
