An accolade in itself, the review into the effectiveness of the Violence Prevention Unit (VPU) at Rimutaka Prison has been published in a leading international journal: The Journal of Inter Personal Violence 1.
The report is by Devon Polaschek of Victoria University in conjunction with Corrections’ Psychological Service.
The VPU delivered its first programme in 1998, and is a purpose built stand alone unit specifically designed for the group treatment of serious violent offenders. The 30-week VPU programme targets the thinking, feeling, and emotional aspects of the offenders, with the aim of reducing the potential for violent reoffending.
The evaluation compared the outcomes for the first 22 offenders who completed the programme with a similar comparison group who went untreated. The participants were followed up for an average of three years postrelease and their offending patterns were compared with the untreated comparison group.
Although there was little difference between the two groups in reconviction rates for non-violent offences, the rate of violent offending was significantly lower for those who had been through the VPU. Of those, 32 percent were reconvicted for a violent offence after release, compared to 63 percent of the comparison group. In addition, those reconvicted who had completed the programme spent more than double the time in the community before reoffending than those who went untreated.
In a more detailed analysis, it was found that violent reconviction rates for both groups were very similar in the first year, but virtually no members of the treated group violently offended over the next two years.
Research on violent offending has till now been largely confined to specific groups such as domestic violence, juvenile offenders and those convicted of aggressive sexual offences.
The authors noted that there are significant limitations to the evaluation because of the small numbers of offenders involved, and the impracticability of randomly assigning serious violent offenders to treatment or non treatment conditions for the purposes of research.
The results do provide cause for optimism in relation to the intensive treatment of violent behaviour, and this review is one of very few evaluations of its type to have been published so far.
1 Polaschek DLL, Wilson NJ, Townsend MR, and Daly LR (2005), Cognitive-Behavioural Rehabilitation for High-Risk Violent Offenders: An Outcome Evaluation of the Violence Prevention Unit, Journal of Inter Personal Violence, 20, (December), pp 1611-1627.
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