Exploring the Profiles of Drug Offenders in Croatia

In Croatian prisons, there is a relatively high prevalence of offenders convicted for abuse of narcotic drugs (Art173/2, CC/97) who are heterogeneous in terms of their characteristics. Determining the relationship between the characteristics of those offenders and their behaviour before and during the execution of prison sentences helps predict their future behaviour. Therefore, this study aims to determine the profile of perpetrators of crimes related to the abuse of narcotic drugs, to investigate potential differences among subgroups of these perpetrators, and to examine whether they differ in the assessed risk for future criminal behaviour/probability of recidivism, penitentiary opinion on conditional release (CR), and Conditional release Committee decision on CR. We analysed penitentiaries’ reports with the opinion on CR for 111 male drug abuse offenders (Mage = 31; SDage = 6.51), containing rich data related to various offenders’ characteristics and behaviours. Specifically, we analysed offenders’ socio-demographic and anamnestic data, previous convictions, imposed security measures with sentence, proposed special obligations with CR, elements from the individual programs for the execution of prison sentence, mitigating and aggravating circumstances of committing the crime, positive reasons in prisoners’ application for CR, and penitentiaries’ explanations in support of the prisoners’ application for CR. The conducted cluster analysis did not show statistically significant differences between subgroups of offenders in the assessed risk for future criminal behaviour/probability of recidivism, penitentiary opinion on CR, and Conditional release Committee decision on CR, but there were low to moderate correlations between specific offenders' characteristics and these variables.