Playing tag

The frustrating thing about tagging, or electronic monitoring (EM) is that it could so easily be effective — if only we did it properly. As a former police officer, I can vouch that Theodore Dalrymple is right when he says that it’s a relatively small number of prolific offenders who commit the majority of recorded crime. So if we used the right technology — if these criminals knew that any repeat offence would be almost certain to result in detection and punishment — then reoffending rates would fall. But although there’s a lot of potential in EM, I’m afraid the potential has been unrealised in this country. Ever since 1989, when we first started deploying EM as an alternative to prison and an aid to rehabilitation, we’ve got it wrong.

The Ministry of Justice is preparing to spend £3 billion over nine years on new EM arrangements. These urgently need to be better than those we currently have, but the signs do not look good. In September 2012, Policy Exchange published ‘The Future of Corrections’. Later that month, File on 4 reported into the finances of Serco, one of two UK tag providers. Its discovery of gigantic profits in Serco’s technology subsidiary aroused the interest of Margaret Hodge’s Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, which asked some hard questions about this apparent fleecing of the taxpayer.

These reports should have caused the MoJ to change direction. But I’m afraid the fact that they are preparing a nine-year contract suggests that they have not done so. Has nobody in the MoJ noticed that technology gets better and cheaper all the time? Why on earth would they give a nine-year contract to one provider? The MoJ has overseen a sclerotic, centrally controlled, top-down system that has enriched G4S and Serco (the UK’s duopoly suppliers of electronic monitoring), but lacks innovation and flexibility and does nothing to reduce offending.