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The “care package,” prison domestic violence programs and recidivism: a quasi-experimental study

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Abstract

Objectives

Although there are many evaluations of domestic violence rehabilitation programs, it is still unclear “what works” in this field, especially when it comes to programs within prison walls. Today, most studies indicate that domestic violence programs based on cognitive behavioral treatment, or psycho-educational models show small positive results. Yet, there is still insufficient empirical literature providing adequate evidence for the impact of integrative treatment, where different methods and approaches toward domestic violence prisoners are employed within the same rehabilitation-program framework while incarcerated. Our study examined the effects of an integrative domestic violence program with a therapeutic “package” implemented in Israel with the goal of reducing recidivism rates among prisoners in general, and especially with regard to violent offenses.

Methods

Using propensity score matching methods, we compared treated offenders to a matched sample drawn from all convicted prisoners who were released from prison between 2004 and 2012.

Results

The findings indicate that the percentages of reincarceration and rearrests of inmates, who participated in integrative domestic violence program, were significantly lower during a period of up to 4 years after release.

Conclusions

Our conclusion is that the integrative effect of different treatments along with a supportive prison climate increased the success of inmates who participated in the domestic violence program.

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Notes

  1. Feder and Wilson (2005) in their meta-analysis showed that longer treatments are more effective in reducing when it comes to domestic violence offenders.

  2. Program integrity refers to the delivery of programs in relation to “the explicit guidelines contained within manuals relating to content, timing, staffing, scheduling, and delivery of services” (Bowen and Gilchrist 2004: 225).

  3. Kubiak and her colleagues suggest that integrating different methods of treatments helps reducing the likelihood of recidivism in cases where the offender has mental health problems or addiction problems (Kubiak et al. 2011).

  4. Therapists in the House of Hope do not use the term “punishment” as part of their therapeutic perception/concept.

  5. It should be noted that the token economy, which refers to a technique in which every prisoner received good points for good behavior and bad points for bad behavior, thereby resulting in either punishment or reward, ceased to be used in 2003. This means that in our sample none of the subjects participated in the program at a time when this technique was in use. Furthermore, unlike in other therapeutic communities the participants are not expected to inform the staff about negative behaviors of other participants.

  6. No security prisoners were included in this analysis.

  7. Represent only the socio-economic grade of the city which the prisoner came from, given by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

  8. This variable was taken from the “sorting committee” protocol, a committee that convenes when the prisoner enters the prison, and includes information about the prisoner.

  9. To calculate how much lower the chance of recidivism is, we used the following formula: control group recidivism rates minus domestic violence program participants’ recidivism rates, divided by control group recidivism rates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Badi Hasisi, David Weisburd & Noam Haviv

  2. Ashkelon Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel

    Efrat Shoham & Anat Zelig

  3. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, Center for Evidence-Based Criminology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    David Weisburd

Authors
  1. Badi Hasisi
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  2. Efrat Shoham
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  4. Noam Haviv
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  5. Anat Zelig
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Correspondence to Badi Hasisi.

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Hasisi, B., Shoham, E., Weisburd, D. et al. The “care package,” prison domestic violence programs and recidivism: a quasi-experimental study. J Exp Criminol 12, 563–586 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9266-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9266-y

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