Effectiveness of the Prison-Based Duluth Programme for Perpetrators of Domestic Violence in Light if Return to Crime – Polish Experience

Abstract

Domestic violence is a phenomenon on which, for many years, there have been turbulent discussions in Poland – not only in the media and political forums, but also in the scientific community. The article presents analyses on the effectiveness of one of the key programmes addressed to perpetrators of domestic violence who are serving their sentences in prison. The Duluth programme, also known as the Duluth model, is essentially aimed at perpetrators of violence against female partners, however, it has seen many modifications and is widely used in the case of both custodial and non-custodial sentences. The results obtained indicate statistically significant differences in return to crime depending on whether the convicted person participated in the programme for perpetrators of violence or not. Among the convicts in the experimental group, i.e. those who had completed the program, the return-to-crime rate was 37%, whereas in the control group it was 55% – that is, it was significantly higher among those who had not completed the programme. As already mentioned, these differences were statistically significant.