Prioritizing criminal justice responses to intimate partner violence would make sense if there was reason to believe that it was working. But that’s not what the evidence shows.

It’s true that rates of domestic violence have been dropping in the United States for years. But so has the overall violent crime rate. From 1994 through 2000, those rates fell about the same amount — a 47 percent decline for violent crime generally, a 48 percent decline for intimate partner violence. For the decade following, however, total violent crime decreased much more than rates of intimate partner violence, which stayed essentially the same — even though during this period, the Violence Against Women Act continued to devote hundreds of millions of dollars to criminal justice responses. Domestic violence homicides actually increased 19 percent between 2014 and 2017; and gun-related domestic violence homicides were up 26 percent between 2010 and 2017.

In 1984, Drs. Sherman and Berk warned that their influential study should be replicated before the police followed its suggestions. That warning was prescient: Replication studies have shown that arrests have modest effects on deterrence in some places, no effect in others, and can actually spur violence. One study found that the likelihood of reoffending was entirely attributable to other factors — like a criminal history — rather than arrest. The impact of prosecution is similarly inconclusive: A conviction may have some effect on recidivism, but its deterrence largely disappears without continuous monitoring, such as intensive probation.

What we do know is that relying primarily on arrest and prosecution exacerbates conditions associated with intimate partner violence, which strongly correlates with poverty. Low-income women are more likely to be victims; under- and unemployed men are much more likely to be batterers. Having a conviction makes it much more difficult to find and keep employment — and employed former prisoners earn 40 percent less than people who have never been incarcerated.

Trauma also contributes. Childhood experiences like abuse, neglect or witnessing violence suggest whether a person will bring violence into his or her home. And incarceration is traumatic. We punish people for violence by putting them in places where they are likely to witness or experience violence, and then send them back into their communities and relationships.

Encouraging a larger role for law enforcement also had the unintended consequence of punishing victims. In the aftermath of the Sherman and Berk study, cities and states rushed to adopt mandatory arrest policies. But the largest increases were in arrests of women. In California, for example, arrests of women increased 156 percent; arrests of men increased by 21 percent. Mandatory arrest policies tend to lead to an increase in arrests of women particularly in “situationally ambiguous” cases, where police officers may be unclear about what exactly occurred before their arrival.

Even if victims avoid arrest, prosecutors, in their zeal to win convictions, sometimes confront them with a horrible choice: Testify against your partner or go to jail. Victims can be held for days or weeks until they testify. This can lead to absurd outcomes: In 2015, at the request of the Orleans Parish prosecutors, Renata Singleton was held in jail for five days to compel her testimony. The boyfriend she was called to testify against pleaded guilty, and served no jail time at all.