Classification without Validity or Equity: An Empirical Examination of the Custody Rating Scale for Federally Sentenced Women Offenders in Canada

Abstract

In order to fulfil its legal mandate to assign an initial security classification of minimum, medium, or maximum to all federally sentenced women offenders, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has used the Custody Rating Scale (CRS) - an objective statistical tool - for more than a decade. Despite CSC's numerous claims of this tool's validity and the equity of its outcomes, it has been repeatedly suggested that the CRS misclassifies women in general, and Aboriginal women in particular. This article extends the (theoretical) debate surrounding the applicability of the CRS for these two sub-groups of the inmate population. Using actual findings published by CSC, this article empirically demonstrates that the overall scale, one of its two sub-scales, and many of the individual items making up the classification tool have weak or no predictive validity for Aboriginal and/or non-Aboriginal women. Further, it provides evidence that the CRS introduces a systematic bias against Aboriginal (relative to non-Aboriginal) offenders whereby a substantial proportion of these minority women are unjustly over-classified in higher levels of security. The article concludes with a discussion of several of the broader theoretical and policy implications of these findings.