Labour’s prison crisis ‘magic fix’ fails to work

Every day in London 100 tagging breaches are reported to the police, said Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, on LBC this morning. Of those brought back to the courts, “95 per cent plus are simply bailed back on the same conditions, with zero sanction”. Those of us who think that electronic tagging is a solution to prison overcrowding are going to have to face up to the fact that the technology doesn’t work the way we thought it did.

Perhaps that’s why Kemi Badenoch yesterday effectively called me a champagne socialist. “Champagne socialists and people who have never had to live amongst dangerous criminals think it is fashionable to say there should be fewer people in prison,” she said in her conference speech in Birmingham. This is unfair. I don’t like champagne, and a long time ago I worked on a North Sea oil rig with some of Dundee’s hardest, for whom the rig was a home from home from prison. But it is true that I think we lock up too many criminals. I do not believe that crime is worse in the Netherlands and Germany, where about half as many people are in prison as in Britain, adjusting for population size.

One of my suggestions was that we should use tagging more, in particular to ensure that offenders stay away from the places where their victims live. But it turns out that tagging does not work the way I thought it did. A brilliant investigation by Madeleine Spence for The Sunday Times at the weekend revealed that ankle tags can take five months to fit; that 700 criminals have currently refused consent to the tag being fitted despite it being a condition of them being out of prison; that we don’t know how many of them have been returned to prison as a result; and that the probation service works from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday — tag breaches outside these hours have to wait until the next working day for action to be taken. I think most people assumed that criminals had tags fitted before they left prison, and that any breach of tag conditions would set off an alarm that would be acted on immediately. Not so. There are actually two parts to the tag: the device locked on the ankle, and a base unit in the criminal’s home that detects the presence of the tag.

The base unit has to be installed by Serco, the services company, which is required by the terms of its contract with the Ministry of Justice to make two attempts to visit the criminal’s address “by midnight the day after the order is received in 95 per cent of cases”. It is currently meeting that target, but that doesn’t mean the person is in or answering the door when visited, and “only 62 per cent of people between January and April with a tagging order were fitted in two attempts”.

At this point, I am overcome by a severe case of “why don’t you just” syndrome, as diagnosed by Emily Lawson, the former civil servant who ran the coronavirus vaccine programme. She said in a recent interview: “We often got what I classify as ‘why don’t you just’ comments from senior politicians when we tried to describe why we weren’t moving as fast as they’d like. One example was: ‘Why don’t you just take 10,000 civil servants off their day job and send them out into vaccination centres, and then you’ll vaccinate much more quickly.’ That would mean I’d suddenly have 10,000 people who were not CRB checked, who could not actually vaccinate, with no training, milling around my very operationally successful vaccination centres. Why do you think that’s a good idea? It’s because they’d never had to run an operational process.”

But I do not see why ankle tags cannot use mobile phone technology so that they work without base units and can monitor the location of criminals at all times. Then they could be fitted in prison before the subject is released. Meanwhile, Rowley reports from the sharp end of the Conservatives’ early release scheme. (Just my little partisan point: the Labour government may be responsible for deciding precisely whom to release and whom to keep in, but the need for early release was forced on it by its Conservative predecessor, which allowed overcrowding to reach dangerous levels.)