The Pinal County Domestic-Violence Court: Some Early But Encouraging Results

This brief, the third issue in the "Criminal Justice Issues for Arizona" series, reveals that Pinal County's specialized court for domestic-violence cases offers some promising results for dealing with this common and complex offense. This report contains an analysis of data collected in the Pinal County Domestic Violence Database, which as of April 2008 contained 666 case records of domestic-violence offenders who were processed by one of the three courts. The database also contained information on a comparison group of offenders; however, these offenders are not included in this analysis because of insufficient numbers. Court officials are currently developing a more appropriate comparison group for use in a subsequent analysis. Table 3 presents the frequency and percent of offenses by levels of education: 8th grade and below, some high school, high school diploma, some college, college graduate, post-graduate degree, and unknown. Key findings include: (1) Offenders showed a significant increase in their self-reported coping abilities and in their satisfaction with the criminal-justice system during their period of supervision; (2) Offenders showed a significant decrease in their self-reported propensity for abusiveness to an intimate partner during their period of supervision; and (3) Only 9% of offenders committed another offense while in the program.