Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.
The news agenda has been quite chewy of late, so not many people will have noticed the publication of The Home Detention Curfew and Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods (Amendment) Order 2024, slipped out last month.
Statutory Orders can be made through delegated authority from primary legislation. What this means with this draft order is that from July next year, the length of time a prisoner is eligible to be released on electronic monitoring before the end of his sentence is doubled from a maximum of 6 months out to a maximum of a year, without the faff of any further debate in Parliament.
So what? Well, electronic monitoring or tagging has been used since the late 1990s. It is deployed mainly to manage risky prisoners released on different forms of licence by applying an ankle tag which offenders must wear continuously as a condition of continuing release from jail. An offender who agrees to be tagged will be released and go to an approved premises or home address and a contractor will arrive to fit and activate the tag.
These tags have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. The original purpose was to ensure that a prisoner abided by a curfew because he always had to be within a certain distance of a monitoring station within his address. Should he or she leave the property an alarm would be sent to the monitoring company.
Breaches of home detention curfew often resulted in the offender returning to prison. The new generation tags are now much more sophisticated. The penalty for breaking the rules created an incentive to comply which protected the community and ensured the court’s sentence was carried out.
It also created an incentive for private monitoring companies to cut corners. They did so with breathtaking cynicism. In 2013, the Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into Serco and G4S regarding tagging fraud. This investigation focused on allegations that both companies had overcharged the government for electronic monitoring services, including billing for tagging individuals who were either dead, in prison, or had never been tagged.
A mere 7 years later, G4S accepted responsibility for fraud, agreeing to pay a financial penalty of £38.5 million, along with £5.9 million in costs. They also paid £121.3 million in compensation to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) as part of a civil settlement. Serco was fined £19.2 million plus £3.7 million in costs as part of their DPA. Senior executives at both companies avoided criminal prosecution.
This is important. The same two companies have recently been paid about £450 million for next-generation tagging including this new batch of eligible prisoners. That’s a punishment of about £170 million for a reward of £450 million. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
These companies will be taking part in a strategy designed to remove the possibility of an emergency mass release of prisoners ever again. A doubling of eligibility for the Home Detention Curfew seems to be designed to coincide with an emergency recruitment drive for probation officers delivering capacity to that beleaguered organisation.
I hope that’s the plan, because, quite apart from the impact on victims and confidence in the justice system, releasing offenders earlier and earlier from custody merely transfers risk from somewhere with real walls to somewhere with virtual ones. And the Probation service is by any metric you care to name on its knees.
Civil Service World described a service ‘in meltdown’ in September with average caseloads for officers of 50-60, some offices with 50 per cent of staff absent, and some officers working at 200 per cent of capacity. In the last reported year, serious further offences, grave crimes including rape and murder, committed by offenders being supervised by probation officers was 10 per cent up at 578. In some probation offices in London, the average staff sickness is three weeks a year.
This is the service that the Government is loading yet more risk onto with dodgy companies and knackered public servants. It ought to make a prime target for a Conservative opposition in the name of public protection. But the Tory front bench consists of former ministers who if not directly involved at least colluded in the destruction of the criminal justice system over 14 years of ludicrous ideological vandalism, disinterest, defunding, and decay.
There is no way to gild the lilly here. The only basis to build on is a frank admission of guilt, some overdue humility then some fresh ideas that keep public protection and public confidence at the heart of any arguments for improvement.
Reform of our criminal justice system should be a matter of cross-party consensus. Labour has sensed this but only to the extent that they have seen the advantage of the political cover provided by sticking David Gauke on a sentencing review with the conclusions already written.
The composition of the ‘experts’ advising him strongly suggests that there will be a glib acceptance that short sentences are bad, people are in prison far too long anyway, and another reheat of ‘tough’ community penalties. Short sentences are used all over Europe. They aren’t intrinsically bad. We’re just awful at them.
Serious offenders do need to be put away for a very long time to punish and deter. Retribution is not a dirty word. But imprisonment without purpose in brutalising indolence awash with drugs is a moral and fiscal disgrace.
Home Detention Curfew can work very well. The means now exist in wearable technology such as tags to create ‘geo-fences’ to keep offenders away from risky places using GPS. They can help with desistence from alcohol and drugs by monitoring them on the skin. But the public must keep pace with policies designed mainly to avoid Labour being put in a position again where dangerous offenders are released en masse as the first memorable act of a new administration followed by freezing pensioners and walloping farmers.
There is room for Kemi Badenoch to work constructively with the Government but offer true and radical alternatives to crime policies that might go down well in the senior common room but fail to impress the saloon bar. The list is long and I have written an extensive menu in my latest book.
But let us end with one no-brainer. People in prison for non-violent crimes related to drug addiction should not be there. They will comprise a fair number of the approximately 11,000 people banged up for drug offences: people who destroy communities and themselves committing acquisitive crimes that shut down the corner shop and blight areas where dealers outnumber people in authority.
This is a medical problem. Instead of custody to make them worse and turn them into frequent fliers who clog up the penal system, they should be given compulsory and secure detoxification treatment on the NHS. Finding ways to keep the right people out of custody should give Badenoch plenty of food for thought.
But Labour’s ideas on Home Detention Curfew run the real risk of further discrediting prison sentences. The public is bamboozled enough and frequently outraged when the order of the courts is subverted by logistics or rendered meaningless by endless caveats and discounts.
More than that is the very real risk of the moral injury of loading still more work on an overwhelmed probation service having mortal consequences on the streets.
Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.
The news agenda has been quite chewy of late, so not many people will have noticed the publication of The Home Detention Curfew and Requisite and Minimum Custodial Periods (Amendment) Order 2024, slipped out last month.
Statutory Orders can be made through delegated authority from primary legislation. What this means with this draft order is that from July next year, the length of time a prisoner is eligible to be released on electronic monitoring before the end of his sentence is doubled from a maximum of 6 months out to a maximum of a year, without the faff of any further debate in Parliament.
So what? Well, electronic monitoring or tagging has been used since the late 1990s. It is deployed mainly to manage risky prisoners released on different forms of licence by applying an ankle tag which offenders must wear continuously as a condition of continuing release from jail. An offender who agrees to be tagged will be released and go to an approved premises or home address and a contractor will arrive to fit and activate the tag.
These tags have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. The original purpose was to ensure that a prisoner abided by a curfew because he always had to be within a certain distance of a monitoring station within his address. Should he or she leave the property an alarm would be sent to the monitoring company.
Breaches of home detention curfew often resulted in the offender returning to prison. The new generation tags are now much more sophisticated. The penalty for breaking the rules created an incentive to comply which protected the community and ensured the court’s sentence was carried out.
It also created an incentive for private monitoring companies to cut corners. They did so with breathtaking cynicism. In 2013, the Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into Serco and G4S regarding tagging fraud. This investigation focused on allegations that both companies had overcharged the government for electronic monitoring services, including billing for tagging individuals who were either dead, in prison, or had never been tagged.
A mere 7 years later, G4S accepted responsibility for fraud, agreeing to pay a financial penalty of £38.5 million, along with £5.9 million in costs. They also paid £121.3 million in compensation to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) as part of a civil settlement. Serco was fined £19.2 million plus £3.7 million in costs as part of their DPA. Senior executives at both companies avoided criminal prosecution.
This is important. The same two companies have recently been paid about £450 million for next-generation tagging including this new batch of eligible prisoners. That’s a punishment of about £170 million for a reward of £450 million. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
These companies will be taking part in a strategy designed to remove the possibility of an emergency mass release of prisoners ever again. A doubling of eligibility for the Home Detention Curfew seems to be designed to coincide with an emergency recruitment drive for probation officers delivering capacity to that beleaguered organisation.
I hope that’s the plan, because, quite apart from the impact on victims and confidence in the justice system, releasing offenders earlier and earlier from custody merely transfers risk from somewhere with real walls to somewhere with virtual ones. And the Probation service is by any metric you care to name on its knees.
Civil Service World described a service ‘in meltdown’ in September with average caseloads for officers of 50-60, some offices with 50 per cent of staff absent, and some officers working at 200 per cent of capacity. In the last reported year, serious further offences, grave crimes including rape and murder, committed by offenders being supervised by probation officers was 10 per cent up at 578. In some probation offices in London, the average staff sickness is three weeks a year.
This is the service that the Government is loading yet more risk onto with dodgy companies and knackered public servants. It ought to make a prime target for a Conservative opposition in the name of public protection. But the Tory front bench consists of former ministers who if not directly involved at least colluded in the destruction of the criminal justice system over 14 years of ludicrous ideological vandalism, disinterest, defunding, and decay.
There is no way to gild the lilly here. The only basis to build on is a frank admission of guilt, some overdue humility then some fresh ideas that keep public protection and public confidence at the heart of any arguments for improvement.
Reform of our criminal justice system should be a matter of cross-party consensus. Labour has sensed this but only to the extent that they have seen the advantage of the political cover provided by sticking David Gauke on a sentencing review with the conclusions already written.
The composition of the ‘experts’ advising him strongly suggests that there will be a glib acceptance that short sentences are bad, people are in prison far too long anyway, and another reheat of ‘tough’ community penalties. Short sentences are used all over Europe. They aren’t intrinsically bad. We’re just awful at them.
Serious offenders do need to be put away for a very long time to punish and deter. Retribution is not a dirty word. But imprisonment without purpose in brutalising indolence awash with drugs is a moral and fiscal disgrace.
Home Detention Curfew can work very well. The means now exist in wearable technology such as tags to create ‘geo-fences’ to keep offenders away from risky places using GPS. They can help with desistence from alcohol and drugs by monitoring them on the skin. But the public must keep pace with policies designed mainly to avoid Labour being put in a position again where dangerous offenders are released en masse as the first memorable act of a new administration followed by freezing pensioners and walloping farmers.
There is room for Kemi Badenoch to work constructively with the Government but offer true and radical alternatives to crime policies that might go down well in the senior common room but fail to impress the saloon bar. The list is long and I have written an extensive menu in my latest book.
But let us end with one no-brainer. People in prison for non-violent crimes related to drug addiction should not be there. They will comprise a fair number of the approximately 11,000 people banged up for drug offences: people who destroy communities and themselves committing acquisitive crimes that shut down the corner shop and blight areas where dealers outnumber people in authority.
This is a medical problem. Instead of custody to make them worse and turn them into frequent fliers who clog up the penal system, they should be given compulsory and secure detoxification treatment on the NHS. Finding ways to keep the right people out of custody should give Badenoch plenty of food for thought.
But Labour’s ideas on Home Detention Curfew run the real risk of further discrediting prison sentences. The public is bamboozled enough and frequently outraged when the order of the courts is subverted by logistics or rendered meaningless by endless caveats and discounts.
More than that is the very real risk of the moral injury of loading still more work on an overwhelmed probation service having mortal consequences on the streets.