Using Risk Assessment Instruments to Reduce Incarceration

In today’s episode of The Marketplace of Ideas, Donald Kochan sits down with Chris Slobogin, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Vanderbilt Law School, and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, to discuss Professor Slobogin’s recent monograph titled “A Primer on Risk Assessment: Instruments for Legal Decision-Makers.”  

To read and download the primer, click here. 

Chris Slobogin has authored more than 100 articles, books and chapters on topics relating to criminal law and procedure, mental health law and evidence. Named director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Criminal Justice Program in 2009, Professor Slobogin is one of the five most cited criminal law and procedure law professors in the country over the past five years, according to the Leiter Report, and one of the top fifty most cited law professors overall from 2005-2015, according to Hein Online. Particularly influential has been his work on the Fourth Amendment and technology and his writing on mental disability and criminal law, appearing in books published by the University of Chicago, Harvard University and Oxford University presses and in journals such as the Chicago Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Virginia Law Review. Professor Slobogin has served as reporter for three American Bar Association task forces (on Law Enforcement and Technology; the Insanity Defense; and Mental Disability and the Death Penalty) and as chair of both the ABA’s task force charged with revising the Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards and the ABA’s Florida Assessment team for the Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. He is currently an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute's Principles of Police Investigation Project. 

In recognition for his work in mental health law, in 2016 Professor Slobogin received both the American Board of Forensic Psychology's Distinguished Contribution Award and the American Psychology-Law Society’s Distinguished Contribution of Psychology and Law Award; only a total of five law professors have received either of these awards in their thirty-year history, and none has received both awards. Before joining Vanderbilt's law faculty, Professor Slobogin held the Stephen C. O'Connell chair at the University of Florida's Fredric G. Levin College of Law. Professor Slobogin holds a secondary appointment as a professor in the Vanderbilt School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry.