Program Profile: Cautioning and Relationship Abuse (CARA) [Southampton, England]

This was a policing strategy designed to reduce the severity of intimate partner violence and the rearrests of males who had been previously arrested for, or had admitted to, a first domestic violence offense and received a conditional caution. The program is rated Promising. Results indicated a statistically significant reduction in frequency and prevalence of rearrests of persons assigned to the treatment group compared with those assigned to the control group.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

Program Goals

Cautioning and Relationship Abuse (CARA) was a policing strategy implemented in Southampton, England to reduce the harm caused by people who may commit offenses repeatedly. The program added a conditional caution to the policy of mandatory arrest whenever police had forensic evidence of domestic violence sufficient to justify an arrest. A conditional caution, introduced by the Criminal Justice Act for England and Wales of 2003, is a mechanism that allows an individual to avoid prosecution in court—and thus reduce the potential for a prison sentence, lengthy community service, or a large fine.

Target Population

CARA targeted individuals who 1) were over the age of 18; 2) were male who committed a crime against female victims; 3) had no previous convictions or cautions for violence in the preceding 2 years; 4) were not classified as high-risk individuals; 5) had admitted to the offense or for which there was overwhelming evidence of their guilt; 6) who had been given a conditional caution by the Crown Prosecution Service; 7) were not currently subject to a community-based court order; 8) were not on court or police bail for other offenses; 9) were classified with one of the following: common assault/battery, criminal damage, harassment, threatening behavior, and domestic theft; 10) had an offense that had involved abuse against a past or present (intimate) partner or spouse; 11) had victims who had indicated that their conditional caution would not place them at significant risk; and 12) had a sufficient level of English comprehension to take part in the workshops.

Program Components

To meet the conditions for CARA, participants had to 1) sign a statement making a full admission of guilt for the offense; 2) sign an agreement to complete the condition imposed, whatever it may be; and 3) not be arrested for any new crimes or breach of the conditions within a period of time after receiving the caution, usually 4 months. Police would then find a service provider (typically Hampton Trust) to whom they could hand over the person who had just signed a conditional caution and wait until the provider reported back on whether the individual had completed the conditions (to close the case). If the person failed to meet the agreed upon conditions, they would be prosecuted for the breach of the conditional caution as well as for the initial domestic offense to which they had signed a confession.

As a component of the CARA conditions, Hampton Trust (a charity involved in the provision of services for domestic abuse victims and those who perpetrated a crime against them) developed a 2-day offender workshop, in which they focused on raising awareness of abusive behaviors. The objective was to move them from denial and minimization toward acceptance of responsibility for harm and provide strategies for conflict resolution within the relationship. Participants attended two 5-hour workshops, on separate Saturdays, 4 weeks apart. The workshop facilitators used motivational interviewing to strengthen the program participants’ commitment to change.

Program Theory

The 2-day offender workshops were based on the notion that helping them understand the consequences of their behavior and take responsibility for the harms they caused, as well as providing them with strategies for resolving conflict within the relationship, would reduce likelihood of reoffending. A key aspect of the approach was treating individuals respectfully while condemning their abusive behavior. This aspect of the intervention was therefore consistent with the criminological theory of reintegrative shaming (Braithwaite 1989). This theory suggests that societies can reduce crime by adopting policies that convey the shamefulness of criminal behavior in a way that does not stigmatize the person. Thus, they are viewed as good people who have done bad deeds but can be encouraged to desist from crime through a combination of shaming and forgiveness.

Study 1

Strang and colleagues (2017) conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Cautioning and Relationship Abuse (CARA) policing strategy on future harm caused by individuals with a previous domestic violence offense. The study assessed the 4,768 domestic abuse arrests in the CARA catchment area of Hampshire, England (Western Hampshire, including Southampton), between September 2012 and November 2015. During this time, Southampton police officers brought all individuals arrested for domestic abuse to the “custody suite” of a brand-new Southampton police station, designated for the RCT. Upon arrival for processing of an arrest, a custody officer would perform an eligibility check and refer the potentially eligible case to the Custody Investigation Team (CIT) in a nearby office. According to trial protocol, after screening all the domestic abuse arrests, CIT was required to 1) obtain victim consent for the inclusion of their case in the RCT, 2) confirm Crown Prosecution Service approval of a conditional caution, and 3) acquire arrestee consent to participate in the study. Using 12 distinct eligibility criteria (see the Target Population section under Program Description), 4,475 cases were excluded due to high- or medium-risk assessments or other reasons (e.g., victim or the person convicted of the offense declined to participate, arresting officer did not seek to establish eligibility); the remaining 293 cases were found to be eligible for inclusion in the RCT.

The study authors used a computerized random assignment algorithm called the Cambridge Randomizer to randomly assign 154 person to the treatment group and 139 to the control group. Twenty-seven participants were later removed from the study because the Crown Prosecution Service overrode the police decision to include them in the trial or the cases had been accepted in error by the police but randomly assigned anyway. Thus, the final RCT sample included 141 persons in the treatment group and 125 in the control group. Though 22 treatment group members and 9 control group members breached the conditions of the trial, all were included in the analysis. No demographic information or data on statistical differences between groups at baseline was provided.

The people in the treatment group signed confessions and agreed to the CARA conditional caution and attendance at the two workshop sessions held by Hampton Trust. The control group signed similar confessions and agreements; however, they only received a simple caution, which required that a person not have any repeat offense in the next 4 months. If they failed to satisfy that requirement, they were told they would be prosecuted in court for both the current offense and a new offense. The control group had no other conditions to meet.

All analysis was guided by the intention-to-treat concept. This means that all people who were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions were included in the analysis, even if they breached these conditions somehow. The primary outcome measure was coded according to the Cambridge Crime Harm Index (CHI), which determined any new arrests or convictions in the first 365 days after random assignment and summed, across all new offenses, the total days of recommended imprisonment for each offense. Additional outcomes included the prevalence and frequency of repeat offending or recidivism. All measures were examined both for domestic abuse only and for all offense types. In addition, a sensitivity analysis to determine the difference in outcomes between two periods of enrollment of cases was also conducted. No subgroup analysis was conducted.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: