In the past three decades, developed prison and probation services have paid large attention to risk assessment tools predicting the probability of reoffending. This not only resulted in a more accurate classification of offenders, but also in a more informed choice of effective intervention helping to reduce relapse in offending behaviour. In terms of reducing the risk of reoffending intervention programmes considering the principle of criminogenic risks, needs, and responsivity proved successful, while imprisonment on its own, where intervention methods were not applied, showed only limited effectiveness. For historical reasons, the Czech Prison Service underwent a different development, although its objectives were similar. It was not until the beginning of a new millennium when the Czech prison system together with a newly created probation service decided to seek new methods of assessing offenders based on criminogenic risks. This paper presents development and results of the first Czech tool used for assessment of offenders’ risks and needs, called SARPO (from the Czech abbreviation of Complex Analysis of Offenders’ Risk and Needs). 1. Introduction Offenders are imposed imprisonment sentences in order to prevent them from further offending, to rehabilitate them, and to protect the public. It means to protect the public not only in the time when the offender serves the prison sentence, but also after the offender is released. Developed prison and probation systems have lately turned their attention more and more to the latter aspect. They are aware of their share of responsibility for potential reoffending of the released offenders and they aim at mitigating the risk of reoffending, while assisting the released offender in reintegration into the community. For this purpose they have designed a large number of intervention methods. In order to work with offenders it is necessary to have enough information about their attitudes towards themselves and others, what threats they pose to people that work with them and what chances of their rehabilitation there are. For this reason any intervention with the offender must be necessarily preceded by assessment mapping his/her personal features considering the situations in which the outputs will be used. These outputs may be different during imprisonment and after early release. Thus for a prison guard it will be important to know to what degree the offender is dangerous and whether he/she will present any risk of harm during the imprisonment both towards other people and to himself/herself. A therapist
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