Social therapeutic community treatment in penal institutions – an annual survey
Project date range: since 1997 annually
Description
In social therapeutic treatment, which is offered in most cases in a separate unit of a prison, violent or sexual offenders are given the opportunity to gain new insight and learn new ways how to cope with their lives in order to reduce the probability of criminal recidivism.
The first social therapeutic penal institution relying on a model from Herstedvester in Denmark opened in 1969 but a specific legal provision was only introduced in 1977 when the Prison Act (Strafvollzugsgesetz) came into force. This statute did not make a transfer from regular prison to social therapeutic unit mandatory for a specific group of offenders but just included the possibility for a transfer. In 1998, the Prison Act was amended for a transfer of sexual offenders sentenced to more than two years’ imprisonment without their consent. More recent legislation opened up therapeutic communities again for violent offenders. By now, there are 72 social therapeutic penal institutions, including 21 for juvenile offenders and 6 for women.
Methods
Data of all German social therapeutic institutions are collected annually by the end of March of the current year to cover basic descriptive information and trends of social therapeutic community treatment. A standardised data entry form captures aspects such as
- capacity and occupancy rate of the institution
- prisoners (sex, age, previous convictions, type of offence, length of sentence)
- institutional processes (flow of prisoners, relaxation of imprisonment conditions, ex-prisoner re-admissions)
In 2016, an additional questionnaire was administered to assess psychological diagnostics in social therapy facilities of German prisons. This year, data collection was conducted as usual.
Publications
Publications - Annual Surveys.
Contact
Laura Biedermann
Prof. Dr. Martin Rettenberger