An Examination of the Outcomes of Various Components of a Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence by Male Offenders

In the state of North Dakota, a deferred imposition sentence refers to a court judgment stating that upon completion of the court order the court will withdraw the defendant’s plea of guilty or the verdict of guilty, resulting in the case being dismissed and subsequently the file being sealed.

“Interference with 911” charges include incidents when the suspect interferes with the victim’s ability to call 911.

‘Misdemeanor type A’ charges are generally more serious and involve incidents where the offender has caused substantial bodily harm and/or used a weapon in the incident.

Official arrest histories were provided by the local police department for all domestic violence offenders seen at the CCA. Each client’s name and date of birth were entered into the North Dakota and Minnesota criminal history databases. For purposes of this evaluation, ‘non-sufficient funds’ (i.e., bad checks) charges were not recorded as an arrest because law enforcement agencies in the region had changed the way that these offenses were recorded in recent years which would have introduced unwanted error in the measurement of these offenses over time. If no state criminal history could be found for an offender, a search was conducted on the local police department arrest database, which included arrest histories for several surrounding cities and counties in both North Dakota and Minnesota. If no arrest history could be located from these databases, the County State’s Attorney’s arrest records were also searched. All arrest data was cross referenced between each of the five databases to ensure no charge was counted more than once. The highest level of offense was counted in cases where there were multiple charges in any given arrest event.

A similar logistic regression model was computed to specifically examine the effectiveness of the CCR approach in reducing the likelihood of re-arrest for a domestic violence related offense, rather than overall recidivism. Results of this model reveal that those offenders who had a prior arrest record (b = 1.728, p = 0.057) and who had a prior domestic violence arrest record (b = 1.883, p = 0.016) had a higher likelihood of being re-arrested on a domestic violence charge. As in the overall recidivism model, the number of CCR intervention components completed was not a statistically significant predictor of male offenders’ domestic violence recidivism.