Norming and Validation of the Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI)
Version 2 2024-06-17, 14:20Version 2 2024-06-17, 14:20
Version 1 2015-05-28, 14:37Version 1 2015-05-28, 14:37
report
posted on 2014-02-28, 00:00authored bySharon Casey, Andrew Day
This study provides the descriptive statistics for male and female offenders which will constitute a local (Singaporean) validation of the LS/CMI. The mean age of the full cohort (n = 1,263) on admission was 38.30 years (SD = 10.19) and ranged from 17 to 74 years (Md = 38 and Mo = 35 indicating a close to normal distribution in the sample). The the greatest proportion of crimes for which offenders were incarcerated related to drug offences (n = 816; 64.6%), with the remaining 35.4% constituting one of eight other major crime categories (e.g., crimes against the person, commercial crimes, public order crimes, customs offences, immigration offences, traffic offences, property offences). With respect to drug-related offences which constituted the greatest proportion of crimes overall, the majority of these (n = 577; 70.71%) involved consumption, with the next largest category being the more severe offence of trafficking (n = 162; 19.85%).Sentence length ranged from 265 days to 7,488 days (M = 1,840.92, SD = 918.46; Median = 1,979 days; Mode = 1,826 days). In terms of risk distributions, the male cohort is markedly different to both the US and Canadian comparison profiles and while this may be a product of the small sample size in the Singapore sample (representing 7.5% of the total size of the US sample and 5% of the total Canadian sample) it nonetheless highlights the need for local validation. For example, whereas the percentage of cases in the combined Low and Very Low band (5.3%) falls mid-way between that of the US (2.2%) and Canada (10.2%), the most striking difference is the proportion of prisoners who scored in the Medium range (53.8%), which is almost twice that of the Canadian sample (28.3%) and nearly 3.5 times higher than the US sample (15.6%). While ratings were similar across the High category, the number of Singapore prisoners who scored in the Very High range was substantially lower (1.6%) than either the US (39.5%) and Canada (21.1%). Differences across jurisdictions may be a function of the legal systems and sentencing practices or simply an artefact of the sample that has been recruited thus far.