Workshop Session
The Day Reporting Order (DRO) is one of five types of community-based sentences (CBS) introduced in Singapore in 2011. It seeks to promote offender rehabilitation by minimising social disruption, allowing offenders to maintain prosocial ties in the community, and tailoring interventions based on an offender’s unique risks and needs. In this study, we sought to examine the effectiveness of DRO in reducing recidivism in its first ten years of implementation. We focused on offenders who were sentenced to either a DRO, a combination of CBS orders including a DRO, or a short imprisonment term not exceeding one year, between 2011 and 2020. We adopted statistical matching to identify offenders sentenced to short-term imprisonment, who had similar pre-identified offence and offender characteristics as those sentenced to DRO, and could serve as a control group. We then examined the two-year recidivism rates for the two groups, and how DRO offender characteristics and DRO programme compliance relate with recidivism. In addition to our findings, the challenges and limitations of this study will also be discussed. Considering the appeal of community sentences, which generally focus on rehabilitation and may be more effective in tackling the root causes of crime, this study seeks to contribute to existing knowledge on DRO and its effectiveness as a sentencing option.
