The criminal justice response to wife assault

This paper reviews the criminal justice response to wife assault. By establishing a set of conditional probabilites for the reporting, detection, prosecution, and conviction for wife assault, the paper establishes that a “winnowing process” occurs that is not dissimilar to that reported for other crimes. The probability of wife assault being detected by the criminal justice system is about 6.5%. Given that it is detected, the probability of arrest is about 21.2% [comparable to a 20% arrest rate for a composite of 121 crimes reported by Hood and Sparks (1970)]. Subsequent conditional probabilities for conviction and punishment generate an aggregate probability that, given that an event of wife assault occurs, the perpetrator has a 0.38% chance of being punished by the courts. The policy implications of this review are that the greatest impact on wife assault recidivism reduction would be generated by police arrest rates regardless of court outcome. At present, however, it is not known whether this effect is produced by specific deterrence or by the didactic function of law. It is concluded that too little is known of the subjective states of wife assaulters to ascertain whether deterrence or some other mechanism accounts for the decreased recidivism reported after arrest.