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Emerging trends in Criminal Justice: A Special Issue in Honor of J. Stephen Wormith

This special issue is devoted to J. Stephen Wormith, who passed away March, 2019. Through a series of research papers, we honor Steve’s contribution to criminal justice. The first inclination is to highlight Steve’s contribution to criminal justice “psychology.” But his impact was much greater than that, which in part is reflected by the breadth of articles in this issue. True to a Polanyi view of science, there was a perceived fallibility, expressed by healthy exchanges (i.e., support of the Aggression and Violence conferences), taking risks (considering machine learning), and a responsibility (a “this better be right” attitude in research) in the development of our understanding. Steve understood this well. In addition to seeing this impact on his work colleagues throughout the years, I had the honor to repeatedly witness this as an external examiner in numerous Ph.D. defenses. Present was a kindness and gentle mentorship style, yet hanging onto a strong academic standard. Through this commitment to a strong academic standard, Steve motivated and compelled others to a similar vision of research and scholarship. The articles in this special issue reflect the impact of his contribution to research and scholarship. The Desmarias et al. (this issue) article acknowledges previous pretrial risk assessment reviews (one of which Steve was a co-author), but points out that these reviews have not directly examined predictive validity of the measures. This study examines predictive validity by instrument across outcomes of new criminal activity, new violent criminal activity, failure to appear, and technical violations. These results are also conducted by gender and race/ethnicity. Overall, solid predictive validities were found across outcome and groups. Of interest, the evaluation of risk assessment studies scores the RAGEE on each included article (actual scores are in the supplemental materials). This represents an increase in the standardized evaluation of risk assessment studies.