What Works for Women?: A Comparison of Community-Based General Offending Programme Completion

Women's completion rates on General Offending Programmes are significantly lower than men’s. Is this evidence of the programmes’ design and delivery being focused on men? This study uses multivariate statistical techniques on national data for 2006-07 to examine the characteristics significantly predicting completion rates for General Offending Programmes. In particular, it uses criminogenic factors from the OASys risk-assessment tool to identify the features predicting compliance, as captured by the Interim Accredited Programmes System (IAPS), and determine whether they differ between men and women. The results show significant variation between the women and men in the predictors of programme completion. The practical implications of these for research, policy and practice are discussed.