Whiff of scandal over electronic monitoring
The Centre for Crime and Justice today called for the use of electronic monitoring (so-called “tagging”) as part of a criminal justice sanction to be based on proper evidence and guided by clear principles.
The call came in response to today’s report by the Public Accounts Committee, which paints an alarming picture of government failure and waste.
According to the Public Accounts Committee, nearly £100 million of public funds have been wasted on the failure to deliver a new case management system. Remedial work on the current creaking system will incur extra costs. The Ministry of Justice, the Committee notes, still does not know what works, or whether tagging reduces reoffending. Yet it plans to press ahead with a £1.2 billion programme, expanding tagging to an additional 10,000 people over the next three years.
Dr Roger Grimshaw, Research Director at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said:
Today’s report by the Public Accounts Committee paints an alarming picture of government failures in managing electronic monitoring.
At a time when there is so much for them to grapple with, it would be tempting for criminal justice practitioners and observers to assume that the failings exist in some faraway management bubble, with few implications for people under supervision, or their families.
In reality, the expansion of EM being planned is due to create a new world of electronic supervision, supplementary to the prison system, unguided by firm evidence about any positive role in rehabilitation.
The whiff of scandal over EM should be a wake-up call for a much more informed and wide-ranging discussion, developing a platform for reform which delimits a place for EM in a modest, humane and purposeful system.”