Northpointe has developed an automated risk and needs assessment for juvenile offenders. Fully Windows compliant, the instrument is comprehensive in its coverage of risk and protective factors. Youth COMPAS is designed to take advantage of recent research on the predictors and needs factors most strongly linked to delinquent behavior. It also incorporates the "strengths perspective" and contains many critical factors that may protect the high-risk youth from serious delinquency.

A further characteristic of Northpointe's Youth COMPAS is that it deliberately incorporates a theory-based approach to assessment. Thus, the assessment is designed key scales from several of the most important theoretical explanations of crime and delinquency—e.g. social bonding and control theory, strain theory, Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime, criminal opportunity/lifestyle theories, Moffitt's taxonomy of juvenile offenders and Bandura's cognitive model of moral development. Extensive measurements assess the key areas of family, school and peer contexts, in addition to individual personality and cognitive characteristics of youth.

The software has been designed to be easy to use and efficient for those who work in busy agencies with high caseloads. The length of the assessment can be adjusted by agency staff to fit their workload and intervention/explanatory needs by selecting various scale combinations from any of 31 criminogenic and needs scales. A computer-generated graphic report is used to pinpoint the critical problem areas of each youth and to provide decision support for case planning, treatment and placement decisions.

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