Aren't curfews related to police states?

I recall that in 1977, as I broke into a garage showroom in Leeds, that I was not deterred by the warning notice stating that these premises are protected by Group 4, 24 hours security. I remember looking down from an office window as a white mini van with Group 4 security painted upon it pulled into the garage forecourt, and the driver got out and turned his key in a little box on the garage wall, to show that he was doing his job of patrolling the garage, and drove off again. I thought whatever the garage was paying Group 4 for total 24 hours security, they were being robbed!

It reminds me of the night clockie in prison who had to interrupt his TV viewing every hour to rush along the landings and turn his key in the little box at the end of the landings to prove he had checked on the inhabitants of the cells. In 1973, in Lewes Prison, I am recorded as being asleep in my cell between the hours of 02.00 and 06.00, when I had escaped from my cell and gone over the wall for a stroll into the Sussex countryside.

The reason for this trip down memory lane is here. Monitoring of prisoners and offenders is posing something of a problem. Like all measures, they start off in a small way and then grow out of all proportion to the size of the problem. For example, electronic tagging was introduced by Jack Straw in 1999, when 9,000 offenders were tagged and rose to 53,000 in 2004-05. In 2004-05, the Home Office spent £102.3M on electronic monitoring of curfews. Group 4 is paid around £45M by the Home Office to administer the curfew system.

I don't believe that there is such a thing as 24 hours total security. It relies too much on technology not failing, and humans not failing. I think that the government is wasting too much money on trying to achieve the impossible.