A Prospective Study of Effectiveness of Pre-release Intensive Program for Prisoners in Thailand

Abstract

Background: The intensive program for pre-release prisoners has been developed in Thai Correctional System with a prospective cohort study design on the effectiveness of treatment program before releasing prisoners. The samples were 850 prisoners who were drug users. The aim of this was to compare the effectiveness of the pre-release intensive program on the intensive group with the normal group of prisoners in the correctional system. Method: Data were collected by using questionnaires and interview which were conducted in the areas under Department of Corrections, Thailand. Inference statistics were used for the analysis in this research. Results: Firstly, it was found that the prisoners who received the intensive Program improved their criminal rate with Hazard Ratio = 0.294 (95%CI, 0.136-0.632) (p-value < 0.05), and the intensive program was applied in group activities to solve the problem of prisoners. Secondly, based on the analysis using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) to estimate the distance from criminal rate, it was found that there were no differences among the prisoners who entered the treatment program in the intensive group and the control group that have been released on time with statistical significance (p-value < 0.05). Conclusions: Our findings indicated that the intensive program was effective for pre-releaseprisoners who aredrug users form the Correctional. The duration of the implementation of the program was 4 monthsand the behavior of the prisoners must be observed constantly.