20/10/2022
Police Oracle
The number of individuals being actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) has more than doubled
We know that this government is keen on imprisonment, it is after all investing £4 billion to create 20,000 new prison places and the prison population is expected to increase by almost a quarter over the next three years.
The governments tough stance on crime is not restricted to incarceration though. It is also keen on making an increasing number of offenders subject to electronic tagging as today’s Electronic Monitoring Statistics make clear.
Here are the headlines:
The number of individuals being actively monitored increased by 12%
At 30 September 2022, the total number of individuals actively monitored was 14,996, an increase from 13,371 on the same date last year.
Electronic monitoring device court bail orders remains the largest cohort of individuals actively monitored by an electronic monitoring device
The number of individuals actively monitored under a court bail order was 5,979 as at 30 September 2022 or 40% of all individuals actively monitored. This is a 9% increase from 5,471 last year.
The number of individuals being actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) has more than doubled
Between 30 September 2021 and 30 September 2022 the number of individuals actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) increased very substantially by 143% (from 2,161 to 5,243). This increase is the result of the continued roll-out of electronic monitoring to new offender cohorts, particularly immigration bail.
The number of individuals being actively monitored with an alcohol monitoring device has more than doubled
As at 30 September 2022, 1,503 individuals were actively monitored with an alcohol monitoring device, a 153% increase from 593 last year. This reflects both the continued national roll-out of alcohol monitoring from March 2021 and the introduction of alcohol monitoring for prison leavers.
Analysis
As we have seen, this increase in the use of tagging was driven by extensions to the use of location (GPS) monitoring tags for new offender cohorts, particularly for immigration bail, as well as the continued roll-out of alcohol monitoring tags. However, the increases somewhat masks the fact that over the same period the number of individuals actively monitored as a condition of a community sentence has basically halved (down by 48%). This decrease began from April this year and is likely to be associated with mandating domestic abuse and safeguarding checks in all cases where electronic monitoring is proposed. It may well be that the chronically under-staffed probation service (an inspection report of five Probation Delivery Units in London published this week revealed that hundreds of offenders were not even allocated a probation officer) has just not had the time to do these checks, meaning that GPS tags cannot legally be imposed.
The increase in the numbers of people on tags as a court bail condition is attributable to two main factors. Firstly, the use of electronic monitoring for those on court bail increased sharply in early 2020 in response to the covid pandemic’s impact on the courts. Secondly, tags are now used for people on bail for immigration matters. The Immigration Act 2016 introduced a duty on the Home Office Secretary of State to impose an electronic monitoring condition on Foreign National Offenders and other non-UK citizens subject to deportation proceedings. Following this, in August 2021, HMPPS began using GPS monitoring for these individuals who have been released from Prisons or Immigration Detention under ‘Immigration Bail’ on behalf of the Home Office. From 31 August 2022 this was extended to Scotland and is planned to extend to Northern Ireland later this year which is likely to see numbers increase further.
Another part of the increase is due to the introduction of alcohol monitoring tags. Alcohol monitoring was introduced in October 2020 and went live throughout England and Wales on 31 March 2021 to support the new community sentencing option, the Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirement (AAMR). An AAMR may only be used when sentencing for alcohol-related criminal behaviour and it imposes a total ban on drinking alcohol for up to 120 days. Compliance with the ban is monitored electronically using an alcohol tag which continuously monitors for the presence of alcohol in offenders’ sweat. Although there are now 1,503 people subject to alcohol tags, it appears that take-up is reasonably slow, given the fact that low-level alcohol-related crimes are so common.
One inevitable consequence of the increase in the use of electronic tagging is that a proportion of people who are tagged will fail to comply with their tagging requirements and end up in custody, swelling our prison numbers even further.