The following sections begin with a description of the HD program features, based on review of the relevant legislation (Acts and Regulations) and policy and procedures documentation for each jurisdiction participating in the study. The specific features include those identified as critical success factors or commonly acknowledged good practice characteristics in a review of the international research and practice literature and features considered by Australian home detention managers as contributing to successful outcomes. This section addresses the first project objective of providing an understanding of the range of home detention programs currently operating in Australia and New Zealand.
The next section provides information about program operations with implications for the outcome performance analysis, including a review of numbers and trends, and caseload and cost where jurisdictionally comparable information is available to the study.
The final analysis section compares jurisdictions on a common program outcome measure, based on the indicator of ‘order completion’ used in national comparisons in the Report on Government Services. It also discusses other possible outcome measures for future data collection, informed by the international literature review and discussions with home detention program managers in each jurisdiction. This section therefore addresses the second project objective of identifying available measures of successful outcomes of the HD programs and analysing the factors underlying variations in performance across jurisdictions.