Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major public health issue; worldwide, almost 1 in 3 women is affected. Police involvement in IPV cases has substantially increased because of “proarrest” and “procharging” policies and the enforcement of laws protecting victims of domestic violence. In the course of these changes, several front-line instruments have been developed to structure police risk assessment and decision-making strategies in such cases. One of those is the Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA). To investigate its validity in a Swiss police setting, a total cohort of male IPV offenders was retrospectively assessed for a fixed time at risk of 5 years. The recidivism base rate was 32% when recidivism was defined as subsequent police-registered IPV. Although ODARA scores were significantly correlated with IPV recidivism, they showed poor discrimination and calibration. Despite comparable base rates of recidivism, the Zurich sample scored significantly higher on the ODARA than the development sample. This mismatch of the expected and observed recidivism rates resulted in an overestimating of risk, especially in the two highest risk bins. Several reasons for those deviations, such as level of intervention, victim’s reporting behavior, and the dynamic nature of IPV, are discussed.

The best method of ensuring public safety is a widely debated issue among researchers, politicians, and society as a whole. Switzerland uses an approach combining punitive and rehabilitative interventions by its correctional system to address the challenges presented by criminality. In Switzerland, the prison population comprised 87 out of every 100,000 inhabitants in 2012. In that same year, a total of 7,072 people were imprisoned in Swiss correctional institutions and of those 81 participated in an offense related treatment program. In 2013, occupancy rates in Swiss prisons exceeded the maximum, making prison overcrowding one of the most serious problems faced by the correctional system.

The German correctional system is based on a dualistic arrangement of penalties and rehabilitative measures. In 2012, a total of 56,562 convicts were serving a prison sentence in a correctional institution, and 10,721 were being treated in a court‐ordered intervention. By the end of the 1990s, forensic psychiatric treatment based entirely on a medical model was replaced by a multimodal approach, aimed at reducing dangerousness in offenders. The current focus of public discussion in Germany is the role of preventive detention, which requires a shift from merely “locking away” the offender toward active treatment in various forensic settings.