Court Responses to Batterer Program Noncompliance: A National Perspective

Previous Relevant Research

Over the course of the last decade, as public attention to the crime of domestic violence has
intensified, so too has the scrutiny of batterer programs. These programs have become a staple of
the justice system response to domestic violence; yet their purpose and effects remain
controversial.

There are two theorized benefits to batterer programs: (1) they stimulate cognitive and
behavioral change and (2) they serve as a mechanism for the court or probation to monitor
offenders. As the utilization of batterer programs by the courts has mushroomed over the past
decade, research has focused primarily on the former hypothesis that batterer programs change
individual behavior through participation. Studies have reviewed re-arrest records, interviewed
victims, and measured attitudinal change among participants in the attempt to establish the
impact of batterer programs on individual offenders. Do completers differ from dropouts in their
subsequent patterns of offending; and do dropouts differ from those who never attended at all?
Are some types of programs more effective for one personality type, or racial or ethnic group,
than another?

As the research has grown in sophistication, the possibility that these programs might have a
substantial and positive impact on offenders has grown increasingly dubious. Only four true
random assignment experiments have been conducted of batterer intervention programs, yielding
conflicting findings. In the Ontario experiment (Palmer, Brown, & Barerra, 1992), men assigned
to the program had considerably lower re-arrest rates than men in the control group and 70% of
the men completed the program. The small sample size (59 men) casts doubt on the validity of
the results. Several years later, the San Diego Navy experiment (Dunford 2000), found no
significant differences among men assigned to a batterer program, to couples counseling, to
monitoring and case management, or to a control group. However, the ability to generate from
this finding was compromised by the unusual sample, which included only Navy personnel and
excluded substance abusers, men with criminal histories, unmarried men, men with mental
disorders, unemployed men.

The contradictory findings of the Palmer et al. and Dunford experiments were not resolved by
the next randomized experiments. The Brooklyn experiment (Taylor, Davis and Maxwell 2001)
found that men mandated to a batterer program had significantly fewer re-arrests than those
assigned to community service. Strangely, however, there was no effect of actual program
attendance, only of assignment: men who were assigned to the treatment condition but never
attended a single session of the batterer program did just as well as men who attended every
session. Davis et al. also found an effect of length of the program while holding intensity
constant. Some men attended the 39-hour program in 26 weekly sessions, while others attended
for the same number of hours but in longer biweekly sessions over only 8 weeks. More men

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completed the 8-week program than the 26-week program. Under the hypothesis that completers
do better than non-completers, the 8-week program group should have had fewer re-arrests on
average than the 26-week program group. The findings were the opposite, however: only the 26-
week group had a lower re-offending rate than the control group. This result was interpreted as
indicating that, when lower re-offending rates are found among men in batterer programs as
compared to controls, the effect may be attributable to the monitoring function of the programs
(i.e., the men in the 26-week group were under court control for a longer period of time), rather
than to actual learning and change stemming from program participation.

The results of the most recent study are perhaps the most pessimistic. In the Broward
experiment, (Feder and Dugan 2002) 404 defendants convicted of misdemeanor domestic
violence who were randomly assigned either to probation plus a six-month batterer program or to
probation only were studied. At the 12-month follow-up assessment, there were no differences
between the two groups on measures of attitudes toward women and domestic violence, or on
victim or official reports of recidivism.

Davis is following up on his findings and on Feder and Dugans, in collaboration with some of
the authors of this proposal, in a fifth study that is one year from completion. Five hundred
defendants are being randomly assigned to different schedules of judicial monitoring. Half are
also required to attend a batterer program. Preliminary results suggest that it is unlikely that re-
offending rates will be lower among those assigned to a batterer program than among those
assigned to judicial monitoring only (Labriola, Rempel & Davis, 2004).

Considered together, these studies raise the possibility that attempting to identify the impact of
batterer programs sui generis will not show the positive effects that courts and society have
hoped for. It is possible, however, that we have approached the problem incorrectly that we
have evaluated the wrong elements. There is growing support for the analysis that it is
inappropriate to consider these programs in isolation; that context is vitally important in defining
and assessing program success and failure (Bennett & Williams, 2001; Gondolf, 2001; Frank
& OSullivan, 2001). These researchers and batterer program directors are referring to the larger
system of interests and agencies whose functioning as a coordinated community response
many maintain is the most effective deterrent to domestic violence recidivism (see, for instance,
Murphy, Musser & Maton, 1998; Shepard, Falk & Elliott, 2002; Pence and McDonnell 1999).
They and others urge that evaluations of any single element of the response to battering be
expanded to consider the entire coordinated community response. For instance, Gondolf has
called his extensive four-site study of convicted batterers and their partners a study of batterer
intervention systems, including arrest practices, court procedures, probation supervision,
battered-womens services, and other community services (Gondolf, 2002, p. 2). Pence has
complained that programs claim to be using the Duluth Model when they adapt elements of the
batterer program curriculum created and disseminated by the Duluth program, DVAIP, when, in
fact, the Duluth Model involves a coordinated community response and is not defined by the
batterer program curriculum alone. Pence and McDonnell (199) explain that the full coordinated

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community response involves establishing interagency linkages among all relevant stakeholders
in the community, resulting in changing the climate of tolerance for this type of violence.

The criminal justice system clearly has a central role in the larger universe of community
responses; and the courts may have perhaps the most critical role in relation to batterer programs.
One imperative of a coordinated community response is simply not to drop the ball: it is
incumbent on the courts not to become the hole in the safety net, the place where batterers can
escape consequences or manipulate the system. But the courts can be far more than a small part
of the system, for they have the unique power to monitor and constrain batterers behavior, and to
impose incremental penalties. It seems likely, though by no means certain, that courts can
heavily influence program compliance and re-offense for defendants over whom they have
jurisdiction. Indeed, the hypothesis behind Daviss ongoing study is that it is judicial monitoring
that constrains re-offending. Gondolf points to the early, aggressive action of the courts in one
site including the introduction of monitoring dates as a possible explanation for defendants
positive outcomes (Gondolf, 2000). Others have reported similarly positive effects of close court
monitoring and swift responses to noncompliance in domestic violence cases (Gerlock, 2001;
San Diego Superior Court, 2000; Syers & Edleson, 1992).

Given these positive indications of the impact of court action in monitoring compliance and
responding to noncompliance, it is not surprising that most domestic violence courts cite
supervision and accountability as key practices. In this view, batterer intervention programs
function largely as tools for monitoring offenders rather than for changing their psyches (Mazur
& Aldrich, 2003; Sack 2002). Yet little research has explored how this monitoring is conducted,
how information is exchanged between programs and courts, or how sanctions in response to
noncompliance are imposed.

The dearth of research on the courts role in the coordinated community response and the
overemphasis on batterer programs as the sole mechanism to address battering leaves us with
questions not only about how courts supervise program mandates, but whether they do it.
Because there has been so little empirical data gathered in this field, we are thrown back on
courts own policies and rhetorical promises to hold defendants accountable. But are they
honoring those commitments? How effective is their supervision in practice? And how is
accountability being interpreted and enacted?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that even those courts that formally monitor defendants may not be
aware of noncompliance or may not act on the knowledge they do have whether
noncompliance takes the form of failing to conform to program regulations or a new offense.
Several researchers (Babcock & Steiner, 1999; Harrell, 1991; Palmer, Brown, & Barerra, 1992)
have reported that courts rarely penalize offenders for noncompliance with program mandates.
Before the introduction of the San Diego County Domestic Violence Courts, defendants
compliance was assumed unless the court learned otherwise, essentially by accident. Even when
the court learned of noncompliance by an offender mandated to a batterer program, there was
often no response (San Diego Superior Court 2000). Most disturbingly, Gondolf (2002) reported

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that it was this systemic failure to respond that enabled a small subgroup of men in his four-site
study to re-offend chronically. The examples cited here are drawn from case studies focused
primarily on unrelated research questions. That fact in itself may be illustrative of the lack of
attention to the issue of courts follow-through (or absence thereof) on batterer program
mandates when they are used as a sentence or a pre-trial condition. As Bennett and Williams
(2001) point out, if justice and accountability are indeed goals of batterer programs (Healey,
Smith & OSullivan, 1998) and certainly they are goals of the courts and then the courts role
in serving these goals is essential to explore, despite the dearth of research attention to date.