PRIA-MA — Spain's National Behaviour-Change Programme for Gender-Violence Offenders on Alternative Sentences

PRIA-MA (Programa de Intervención para Agresores en Medidas Alternativas) is Spain's mandatory group-therapy programme for men convicted of gender-based violence and serving community sentences rather than prison, run nationwide since 2010 by the Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias (Spain's Ministry of Interior) through its Alternative Measures and Penalties Management Service.

The programme addresses responsibility-taking, anger management, sexist attitudes and non-violent relationship skills, combining individual assessment with group sessions over roughly ten months.

A 2023 peer-reviewed evaluation published in REC. Revista Electrónica de Criminología followed 101 men who went through the programme at the Alicante Penitentiary Centre's alternative-measures unit, tracking recidivism for further ill-treatment offences over a two-year follow-up after completion (2018–2020).

The study recorded a 6.3% recidivism rate among those who completed PRIA-MA, compared with 11.7% among the 21.8% of participants who dropped out before finishing.

The authors are explicit that this is not a causal impact evaluation: because Spanish law requires all offenders on alternative measures to undergo treatment, no untreated comparison group exists, so the lower recidivism among completers cannot be attributed to the programme with certainty — it may partly reflect that lower-risk men are also more likely to finish. The evaluators' main recommendation is to invest in adherence and motivation work to reduce the sizeable dropout rate, which is itself associated with worse outcomes.