Prisons crisis lays bare the issues with tagging criminals - Jayne Dowle

Thousands of prisoners are leaving jail early due to overcrowding and the public is being wrongly reassured that nevertheless, they will be kept under surveillance.

Yet even before the latest early releases, at least 5,000 individuals with electronic tagging orders had not yet had their devices fitted. Of these, 700 refused to consent to a tag being fitted at all, despite it being a condition of coming out of prison.

The most common reason for failure to tag, according to Ministry of Justice figures, was because the person was not home when tagging field officers arrived. This happened in about 1,300 cases.

Others went untagged because the property couldn’t be found or accessed, which beggars belief. Potentially dangerous criminals on the loose and no-one knows where they are?

Serco, the private company contracted by the government to carry out tagging, is only obliged to visit an offender’s home twice; if they’re not there, there appear to be no sanctions available.

What comfort does this bring to terrified victims? A damning investigation by a national newspaper has found serious flaws in the tagging system - which is supposed to monitor the movements of those released from prison under certain conditions, typically to keep away from their victims or obey an exclusion zone.

Justice secretary, Alex Norris posted a video assuring the public: “Release from prison doesn’t mean freedom.” But if those responsible for fitting the tags can’t find the people supposedly under surveillance, this is hardly comforting.

Tagging clearly is not fit for purpose, worryingly so. Especially when one in 10 tags takes five months to be fitted and only 62 per cent of tags are fitted within 48 hours of the prisoner being released. When a tag is breached it takes on average 20 hours for the authorities to find out and take necessary action.

Despite the government insisting that tagging people “24/7”, with immediate action should conditions be breached, it seems the whole thing is highly precarious.

Ben Cockburn, chair of the National Association of Probation Officers, expresses his concerns that people are not aware of how slow the system could be.

He says tagging is far from “live monitoring”. The MoJ has championed new technology which allows probation officers to “access near-real time” GPS data with a 15-minute delay, but this is misleading. It’s highly likely that if a tagged individual disappears off the system, their absence will not lead to immediate action, he points out.

“What we seem to be saying to the public is that we’ve got some kind of version of probation Batman who’s going to swoop in out of nowhere, tie them up and haul them off to the nearest jail,” says Cockburn. “It’s just not the way the system’s ever worked.”

Although the government exempted 71 offences from the early release scheme, including manslaughter, rape and child grooming, many serious offenders remain eligible to walk free only months into their sentences.

These include Michael Boyes, 40, from North Yorkshire, who was jailed for three and a half years in January after pleading guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm and engaging in controlling or coercive behaviour against Helen Duncanson, 41, his former partner. Four counts of theft were left to lie on file.

Duncanson, who had to move from York due to the debt Boyes caused, is studying to be a paramedic alongside her job as an ambulance technician.

“My plan was, while he’s in prison, I’ll save up some money and get my degree so I’ll be on a better wage and I’ll be able to get back to York where I’ve got support,” she told The Times. “Now, I’m sat here on my own, isolated, 25 miles away from my family. I’m having night terrors again. I feel terrified.”

This is real. And there are thousands of victims like Ms Duncanson. “Survivors of domestic abuse have long told us about their concerns of the failures of electronic tagging, exemplified by recent reports revealing that electronic tags are often not fitted on time for release,” says Alice Russell-Harris, public affairs lead at Refuge, a domestic violence charity.

Under measures introduced to ease prison overcrowding, 1,350 inmates serving terms of up to two years and five months are expected be freed over the fortnight from October 1, double the number originally planned. The rest of the estimated 4,500 releases will follow in phases covering longer sentences, over the next eight months.

It is galling enough that such early-release prisoners are being caught on camera grinning and thanking Andy Burnham for their freedom. What’s worse are the fears about what might happen next.