Domestic Abuse: Reoffenders

(asked on 23rd March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of polygraph tests in preventing reoffending by people convicted of domestic abuse related crimes.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 13th April 2021

Requiring certain sexual offenders on licensed supervision to take polygraph tests has shown itself to be an effective means of protecting the public from harm, as part of a wider set of licence conditions, controls and interventions. As a result of the 5,228 tests carried out on 2,249 sexual offenders between 2015 and 2019, 1,449 significant disclosures were made, providing important information to probation officers which might not have been obtained from other sources. Probation officers have then used that disclosed information to question offenders or make other enquiries, to establish whether they have breached their licence conditions – and where they have, probation officers have taken robust enforcement action, including recalling offenders to custody.

Once statutory powers are available, working with the National Probation Service (NPS), the Cambridge Centre for Evidence Based Policing will conduct a three-year pilot of mandatory polygraph examinations for domestic abuse perpetrators released on licence and assessed as presenting a high risk of causing serious harm. The pilot will involve a randomised control trial, with high risk domestic abuse perpetrators in four of the 12 NPS Regions split into intervention and control groups. Those in the treatment group will be required to take a polygraph test three months after release from custody and every six months thereafter (unless they fail a test, in which case the tests will become more regular). Those in the control group will not be tested, so that we can assess the effectiveness of polygraph testing on outcomes such as compliance with licence conditions, recall rates and reoffending. At the end of the period, the Government will lay a copy of the evaluation report before each House of Parliament and, based on its findings, will make final decisions regarding wider roll out.

Polygraph testing will be one of a set of standard and additional licence conditions to which those in the trial will be subject. The other licence conditions may include exclusion zones preventing offenders going to certain places (usually near where victims live or work), non-contact conditions preventing them contacting victims and their families, curfews, electronic monitoring and completing behaviour treatment programmes.

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