400% - Crimes by prisoners released on electronic tags have increased fourfold in the last 5 years

400%

Crimes by prisoners released on electronic tags have increased fourfold in the last 5 years

By Eric McGraw



When electronic tagging was introduced in 1999, just 1 in 40 individuals committed a crime whilst wearing a tag. Last year, the figure was 1 in 9 a Report has found.

Since January 1999, over 137,000 people have been placed on the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) scheme, one of the largest electronic monitoring programmes in the world.

The Home Office say the scheme is ‘designed to ease the transition of prisoners from custody to the community’. But seven years and £342 million later, HDC has proven to be ‘expensive and inefficient, whilst contributing to an increased level of crime’, the Report claims.

Conservative MP Grant Shapps, who has compiled the Report based on Parliamentary Questions and Home Office research, says that the failings of electronic tagging is a result of ‘inappropriate prisoner selection’. He claims that the HDC scheme ‘is now being driven by a Home Office requirement to rely on tagging in order to ease the overcrowding in our prison system.’

The MP’s Report highlights the fact that in the last two years, Home Detention Curfew has been granted to 36,590 offenders at a cost of £161.9 million. More than 4,000 offences have been committed while people were subject to the conditions of the tag.

The total number of crimes include at least 1,000 violent offences - among them a murder, a rape, four cases of manslaughter, 56 wounding and more than 700 assaults – 145 of them against police officers. Tagged offenders have also committed 20 sex offences and been involved in 100 cases of possessing offensive weapons and one of causing death by reckless driving.

Grant Shapps told Inside Time: ‘Far from saving money, the fact that 1 in 9 of those wearing tags reoffends means that the social cost of the HDC programme is much higher than had originally been thought. It is now clear that the prison population crisis has led to thousands of additional crimes by prisoners who have been selected for electronic tagging and thereby released too early from prison’.

The Home Office point out that the increase in reoffending by prisoners released on electronic tags is to be expected because since 2003 the maximum curfew period increased from 60 days to 135 days. They also say that the increased reoffending rate last year of 1 in 9 or 11.5% involves a very small percentage of those released on the scheme.

The Tagging Game by Grant Shapps MP