Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG) and the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide–Revised (VRAG-R)

The VRAG and the VRAG-R are actuarial instruments designed to estimate the likelihood with which a male criminal offender or forensic psychiatric patient will be charged for at least one new violent offense within a 7- or 10-year period of opportunity to reoffend. Opportunity to reoffend is defined by community access, and violent offending is defined to include hands-on sex offenses. An actuarial instrument derives a probability of a future event’s occurrence by tabulating the frequency with which the event has occurred in the past among individuals from a similar population.

Many decisions about offenders in the criminal justice and forensic psychiatric systems are dependent on formal or implicit appraisals of risk—most importantly, in terms of community safety, the risk of an offender committing new violent ...