Disappointing results of Alcohol Arrest Referral Schemes
A Home Office evaluation of Alcohol Arrest Referral (AAR) schemes has shown largely disappointing results. Pilot schemes were first introduced by the Home Office in 2007, under the Labour Government, as a means of tackling the link between alcohol and offending, in particular in the nighttime economy. This was supported by the Labour Government’s alcohol strategy ‘Safe. Sensible. Social’. AAR schemes aimed to test whether the benefits of brief interventions to reduce alcohol consumption in health settings could be extended to a criminal justice setting, with the additional goal of reducing alcohol-related offending. The schemes aimed to target those arrested for alcoholrelated offences and used brief interventions to emphasise the role that alcohol might have played in their offending, thus becoming a motivational lever to reduce drinking.
However, overall, the evaluations do not suggest that AAR schemes successfully reduced re-arrest. Average costs per intervention across the pilot schemes varied from £62 to £826, but most schemes did not break even as they did not reduce re-arrests overall. There was some evidence of reduced alcohol consumption among those who received the intervention, but for a number of reasons this finding should be treated with caution.
Profile of arrestees
One of the key benefits from the evaluations was finding out more about the population of people who are arrested in the night-time economy. This information is usually difficult to ascertain as flagging in custody for alcohol-related crimes is not consistently recorded. Indeed the comparison groups for both evaluations had to be constructed using proxy measures to approximate this.
The evaluations found that the profile of arrestees was different from practitioners’ initial thoughts; most notably, there was a higher proportion of dependent drinkers than anticipated. Furthermore, an important finding was that individuals were not necessarily prolific arrestees: over 50 per cent had just one arrest for the offence triggering the intervention, meaning no previous or subsequent arrests in the six months either side of the arrest. This was one of the factors making it difficult for the intervention to have a substantial impact on arrest rates. It also raises questions about whether an offender centred approach is the most effective way of tackling night-time economy-related crime and disorder if this is not a prolific group of offenders.
Effectiveness of Alcohol Arrest Referral schemes
The evaluation found that, overall, there was no strong evidence to suggest that delivering alcohol interventions following arrest could impact on criminal justice outcomes, namely reducing re-offending. The evaluation identified several possible reasons for the relative lack of success:
- Brief interventions delivered in a custody suite are not an effective way to reduce alcohol-related offending
- The re-arrest rates for alcohol-related offending are low, meaning that this is not a prolific group of offenders and therefore it would be harder to make any impact on the re-arrest rate
- Insufficient screening was undertaken to target the clients most likely to respond positively to a brief intervention
- The intervention did not sufficiently address the criminogenic needs of those arrested
Home Office reports on evaluation of alcohol arrest referral pilot schemes are available at the following links: