In today's justice systems, effective case management goes beyond simply identifying risks and needs—it requires genuine collaboration with clients. This post explores the evolution from traditional risk assessments to collaborative success planning, showing how involving clients in understanding their assessment results and crafting their own goals leads to more meaningful and sustainable outcomes. 

Evolution of Assessment and Case Planning

Risk and needs assessment for both adult and youth justice populations have evolved considerably over the last four decades. The content, research, precision, methods, and implementation quality have all seen continuous improvements. Most jurisdictions now embrace risk and need assessments as the essential starting point of their work with justice-involved persons in community and custody settings. 

In contrast to risk and needs assessments, improvements in case planning have progressed more slowly. In the early days, it was sufficient to determine risk of recidivism as the key objective. Guided by research developments, practitioners quickly began to realize that they needed risk and needs assessments to help guide their work in addressing the drivers of delinquent and criminal behavior. Both adult risk assessments and youth risk assessments began to include more dynamic predictors of justice involvement (e.g., adaptive skills, employment, attitudes, substance use, negative peer associations, family dysfunction), along with static indices that simply focused on risk of recidivism. 

We now have strengths, risk, and need assessment tools that are very comprehensive in assessing the drivers of delinquency and criminal behavior (often described as “criminogenic needs”). But how can we make the best use of the risk/needs assessment results to help clients achieve success? The freshest new thinking on this issue involves collaborating with the client to understand the risk and needs assessment tool results and to craft success plans together.  

The earlier days of case planning were very simple. Case managers administered assessment tools and gathered the results. Next, they devised plans to address the risks and needs identified through the assessment tool. The plans might prescribe substance abuse treatment for clients struggling with substance misuse, anger management for aggressive behavior, or employment readiness programs for those who were not equipped or motivated to find jobs. Less thoughtful case plans simply specified the conditions of a court order written by a judge (e.g., abide by the conditions of probation, do not associate with other individuals with justice involvement, etc.).  

After the case plan was drafted, the case manager met with the client to reveal the plan. Frequently the case manager would advise that if the individual complied with guidelines of the plan, they would stop getting into trouble and avoid new penalties during their supervision.  

While this method of case planning may be well intended, many would now characterize this approach as missing key opportunities to engage clients. By placing all the expertise in the person of the case manager, there is a failure to bring the justice-involved individual’s knowledge about their behavior into the case planning exercise.   

The Dawn of Motivational Interviewing 

Enter Motivational Interviewing (MI). The popularization of Motivational Interviewing in the criminal justice arena over the last twenty years has significantly shifted the case planning focus from “please do what I tell you” to “how can we help you set an agenda that promotes positive change?” From basic interviewing techniques like OARS (open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, and summarizations) to engagement techniques like evocation, many justice practitioners adopted an approach that helps the client realize the value of change for them and their potential to achieve positive outcomes. 

When Orbis Partners first began implementing risk and needs assessment and case planning in a variety of statewide, non-profits and other government jurisdictions, MI was introduced as the method to link both assessment tools and case planning. In Orbis trainings for implementation of our youth risk assessment tools, YASI and CASSY, and adult assessment tools SPIn and SPInW, we help new users gain or build on basic MI techniques for conducting assessment interviews and collaboratively developing case plans. 

Before case planning begins, use of the OARS techniques by practitioners sets the tone for productive and collaborative discussions with the client from the onset of the assessment interview. OARS sends signals to the client that the practitioner is listening, understands what they are saying, and is interested not only in what went wrong, but in the positive factors that are present in the justice-involved person’s life. Use of these interviewing techniques also helps the practitioner be vigilant to identifying client strengths and incentives for change.  

In following the steps of the Orbis model, the case manager carefully reviews the assessment results and attempts to understand the most pressing issues that should be used to build case plans. Starting with the highest need scores (e.g., employment, aggression, family, social/cognitive skills, negative peer influences, substance misuse, etc.), the case manager focuses on the assessment domains that seem to be direct drivers of an individual’s delinquent or criminal behavior. According to the Orbis model, the next step is to help the client better understand those drivers. 

Evocation is a crucial Motivational Interviewing technique that helps engage clients and encourages them to draw on their own knowledge of themselves to help build success plans. The assumption is that while clients may not offer their own insights, they frequently know what motivates their problematic behavior and how they can turn in more positive directions. With skillful Motivational Interviewing use, the practitioner gently evokes this information, allowing the client to express what is important to them and what they believe they can do to change. 

A New Focus on Strengths 

Motivational Interviewing is a strength-based process and helps practitioners bring out the positive characteristics of their clients. Developments in positive psychology in the broader behavioral health field also helped justice practitioners discover the potential for using strengths to engage clients. In particular, the incorporation of strengths and protective factors in our risk and needs assessment tools has been an extremely positive development. Although not all risk/need assessment tools include strengths, there is growing recognition that such measures offer a more comprehensive profile of justice involved clients.    

Over the last twenty-five years, Orbis Partners has included strengths in all our assessment offerings, YASI, CASSY, SPIn and SPInW. While studies have shown that measuring strengths increases our capacity to predict recidivism, the real advantage of assessing strengths may be in using the results to motivate clients. When practitioners pay attention to strengths as part of the risk and need assessment process, they can help clients recognize and understand the positive elements in their lives, while establishing strength-based goals. These elements can help clients make the changes needed to be successful. Orbis believes that if practitioners are not intentional in searching for strengths during the assessment process, they will frequently overlook strengths and miss out on a critical component of collaborating with clients. 

Client Feedback 

Typically, justice practitioners do not provide clients with feedback on risk and need assessment results as part of the case planning. A structured feedback process is another critical component of the case planning model developed by Orbis. It is routinely implemented with our assessment tools and feedback functionality is built into our web-based assessment and case planning application to assist the process. Case managers who implement our case planning model quickly realize the benefits of this step. 

Feedback drives the collaborative process. It is a simple concept, but very much a game changer. The case manager meets with the justice-involved client to provide feedback after the assessment is completed. Feedback is meant to present clients within an inside picture of the assessment and case planning process and invites them to become equal players in designing a plan for their success.  

A graphic tool is employed to help summarize the results of the assessment for the client. We begin by giving feedback on strengths that were identified in the assessment results and other positive factors learned from the interview. The case manager begins the feedback on strengths with an introduction like this:  

“What I learned from doing the assessment with you is that you have many strengths! You have a lot of positive things going for you and we are actually going to be able to use those strengths to help you be successful on your supervision, and beyond!” 

The case manager then begins to innumerate all the strength factors that were identified and points to the graphic tool that summarizes the information for the client. For example, “you have a very positive relationship with your grandfather… you are recognized as a very productive employee at work… you want to do the best for your children…”.  

After the briefing on strengths, case managers identify incentives for change that the client has expressed. These could be things like wanting to get a job in order to buy a car, building a stronger relationship with a partner, or getting a diploma or certification for a trade. 

After incentives are identified, challenges become the next focal point. The case manager describes up to three important drivers behind problematic behaviors (e.g., criminogenic needs) identified during the risk and need assessment. These areas are labeled “challenges” in the feedback graphic. Examples of challenges could be lack of problem-solving skills, substance misuse, negative influence of peers, or lack of employment. The case manager helps the client understand how these factors are contributing to undesirable outcomes and are holding the client back from success. Frequently clients will acknowledge that they understand the information and offer additional discussion on how they would like to address the challenges. Once clients understand their assessment results through structured feedback, the next crucial step is translating this awareness into action through meaningful, client-driven goals. 

Strength-based Goals: Where do you want to start? 

Goals are very important in the collaborative model. In the past, goals were typically uninspired and created with the narrow scope of a case manager. In reviewing case files, we frequently found unimaginative expression of goals like, “the client will go to AA” or “the minor will attend school regularly.” In collaborative case planning, the client becomes pivotal in the goal setting process, and they contribute to specifying goals. Goals must be written in a way that encourages the client to take responsibility and ownership, and they can no longer be owned by the case manager! 

Following feedback, we invite the client to look at the challenges identified through the risk and need assessment and choose the area they want to start on. We call them strength-based goals. “Where do you want to start?” Sometimes negotiation may be needed, and MI techniques might be used to guide the client’s thinking or to build motivation. 

Next, we are ready for the actual goal setting where the client collaborates to create the goal in their language. We have them describe a broad domain to work on and frame the goal in terms of learning, building, working on, or developing a particular need area. Perhaps the most important element of the strength-based goal is getting the client to express what they will achieve when they reach the goal. This is where we bring in their incentives. Example: “I will learn skills for controlling my anger so I can build a strong relationship with my partner” or “I will work on my study skills so I can graduate and get a job.” Note that “the offender will” or the “the juvenile will” is replaced with “I will”. 

While goals should help the client address the drivers that will reduce their future involvement in the justice system, the goals must also help them achieve the positive things in life that represent incentives for them. There must be a return on investment for the client! 

Language is very important in building a collaborative process! In using this approach, Orbis now refers to case plans as Success Plans. Saying that we are building a success plan is much more appealing to clients than saying we are building a case plan. Case plans sound like something that belongs to the agency (and live in a filing cabinet or computer drive). Success plan implies this is now something that the client owns! 

This shift in language reflects a deeper transformation in our approach. When clients own their Success Plans rather than comply with agency-imposed case plans, they develop genuine investment in the outcomes. The collaborative process empowers clients to recognize their strengths, identify meaningful incentives, and actively chart their path forward. 

The impact is significant: higher engagement, better follow-through, and more sustainable positive changes. By partnering in building success rather than managing cases, we honor clients' expertise about their own lives while applying evidence-based practices. 

Check out our strength-based assessment tools (YASI, CASSY, SPIn and SPInW) that support the collaborative model of building success plans described above. Adoption of our tools always includes training on the collaborative success planning approach that transforms both practice and outcomes. 

Orbis Partners provides solutions for criminal justice and human services systems, specializing in designing and implementing services for at-risk client groups. Orbis' risk, needs and strengths assessment tools are designed to guide the casework process by incorporating an individual's unique set of needs. For more information about our assessments, visit our Assessments page.