OBJECTIVE One concern about the use of risk assessment instruments in legal decisions is the potential for disparate impact by race or ethnicity. This means that one racial or ethnic group will experience harsher legal outcomes than another because of higher or biased risk estimates. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to synthesize research examining the real-world impact of juvenile and adult risk instruments on racial/ethnic disparities in legal decision making. HYPOTHESES Given the nature of research synthesis, we did not test formal hypotheses. METHOD Our systematic literature search as of July 2023 identified 21 articles that investigated the disparate impact of 13 risk assessment instruments on various legal outcomes. Most of these instruments were actuarial pretrial screening instruments. RESULTS Our narrative synthesis indicated that there is not strong evidence of risk instruments contributing to greater system disparity. Ten articles indicated that adopting risk instruments did not create (or exacerbate preexisting) disparities, and eight articles found that instrument use reduced disparities in legal decision making. Three articles reported evidence of disparate impact of risk instruments; only one of these studies received a strong study quality assessment score. We observed a scarcity of high-quality articles that employed what we deem to be the gold standard approach for examining the disparate impact of risk instruments (i.e., pretest-posttest design). CONCLUSIONS The evidence signals that risk instruments can contribute to reductions in disparities across multiple stages of legal decision making. Yet study quality remains low, and most research has been conducted on decisions during the pretrial stage. More rigorous research on disparate impact across diverse legal decision points and approaches to risk assessment is needed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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风险评估工具的不同影响：系统回顾。


目标 在法律决策中使用风险评估工具的一个担忧是种族或民族可能产生不同的影响。这意味着，由于风险估计较高或有偏差，一个种族或族裔群体将比另一个种族或族裔群体遭受更严厉的法律后果。我们对文献进行了系统回顾，以综合研究青少年和成人风险工具对法律决策中种族/民族差异的现实影响。假设考虑到研究综合的性质，我们没有测试正式的假设。方法 我们系统地检索了截至 2023 年 7 月的 21 篇文章，这些文章调查了 13 种风险评估工具对各种法律结果的不同影响。这些工具大部分是精算审前筛选工具。结果我们的叙述综合表明，没有强有力的证据表明风险工具会导致更大的系统差异。十篇文章指出，采用风险工具不会造成（或加剧先前存在的）差异，八篇文章发现工具的使用减少了法律决策中的差异。三篇文章报告了风险工具不同影响的证据；这些研究中只有一项获得了很高的研究质量评估分数。我们发现缺乏高质量的文章，这些文章采用我们认为的黄金标准方法来检查风险工具的不同影响（即前测试后测试设计）。结论 证据表明，风险工具有助于减少法律决策多个阶段的差异。然而研究质量仍然较低，大多数研究都是针对审前阶段的决策进行的。 需要对不同法律决策点和风险评估方法的不同影响进行更严格的研究。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。