OVERVIEW 20

November 2005

1a - THE TRACKING TAG ARRIVES

The announcement on September 2, 2004, by the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, of three pilot projects testing the effectiveness of the GPS (Global Positioning System) Tracking Tag portends a major breakthrough in penology in England and Wales. The effectiveness to be tested would be both technical and penal. If the pilots indicate potential effectiveness, the Tracking Tag promises to become widely used in due course as a means of penal restraint and surveillance throughout the United Kingdom and eventually the rest of the technologically sophisticated world, not least the US where it is already in use in 27 States.

The Home Office's initiative points to the fulfilment of the original proposal and pre-feasibility study presented to the Home Office in 1981 by the founders of the Offender's Tag Association, and of the OTA's sustained advocacy, privately and publicly since 1982, of what electronic monitoring of offenders can offer.

Hitherto, the Curfew Tag alone has been the only mode of electronic monitoring of offenders in Britain. The curfew tag was first tested in England as a practical constraint in 1989, when Douglas Hurd was Home Secretary. It was revived by Michael Howard, on the same Office of State, in the mid 1990s, and its use expanded substantially (and effectively) by successive Labour government Home Secretaries since 1999. The Curfew Tag confirms the presence of the tag-wearer at stipulated premises, usually the tagee s home. It is widely used today in England and Wales in a quasi-parole, early-release situation, and also as a monitored constraint on those serving community orders in the regular field of Criminal Justice and young offenders undergoing intensive supervision (see below 2a ii). The Curfew Tag has proved convincingly successful overall, notwithstanding some criticism to which part could be ascribed a political motivation.

The arrival of the Tracking Tag in Britain vastly expands the potential of electronic monitoring in both the handling and treatment of offenders. It permits 24-hour-a-day surveillance with a high degree of precision (see below 1c) while providing a record of the detailed movement of the tagee minute-by-minute. Subject to any perceived requirement to punish, it is applicable to all offenders willing to live lawfully and temperamentally capable of living lawfully. Whatever it may lack in a punitive function it may stand to gain in a rehabilitative function. In terms of reducing crime, or curtailing the growth of crime, it is of unprecedented significance.

1b - THE PRESENT GOVERNMENT'S INITIATIVE AND INTENTION

The Home Office's pilot projects, begun in September 2004, originally to be conducted over a 12-month period in three areas were extended in July 2005 to continue to June 2006 with an evaluation in March. The three areas are Greater Manchester covering also Bolton, Tameside, Salford and Wigan; the West Midlands in the Birmingham area including Sandwell, Dudley and Smethwick; and a part of Hampshire, covering Fareham, Gosport, Havant, Portsmouth and Southampton.

The purpose was to assess through the course of the period the efficiency of the system on 120 offenders, using an average of 40 per area at any time, and covering a wide range of offending categories. All three areas were to tag prolific offenders and those convicted of domestic violence. Greater Manchester alone was additionally tag a sample of those convicted of sexual offences, and Hampshire young (under 21) prolific offenders.

The West Midlands and Hampshire pilots was to test tagees on a so-called passive tracking basis. This enables authority to check retrospectively each day where the tag-wearer has been throughout the previous 24 hours: whether, for instance, he (or she) has violated any restriction on where a court may have stipulated the tagee may not go. Greater Manchester will additionally pilot what is known as 'hybrid tracking', by which the regional monitoring authority will be alerted instantly in the case of a tagee entering a stipulated exclusion zone such as a convicted paedophile the vicinity of a school.

The larger and heavier component of the tagee's kit is the GPS unit. The size of this varies from that of a small cigar box, (6x3.25x2.5 ins.) to that of a pc mouse, both weighing about 12 ounces, which locates the precise whereabouts of the tagee every few seconds by fixing on signals received from satellites 12,000 miles out in space. At present there are 24 satellites available to public access, permanently orbiting the planet, whose primary function is to serve the requirements of the US Department of Defense. European satellites will soon be available for the same borrowed function. A minimum of 3 satellites at any moment is of course required to pinpoint the position of a tagee's GPS position on a flat plane, placing the tag-wearer's whereabouts on an electronic map. The addition of a fourth satellite signal allows for the elevation to be calculated: the floor level, for instance, in a high-rise block, measurable by the time taken by the radio signals to reach the wearer's unit. As a rule, signals from a cluster of satellites will be engaged, with one satellite taking over the function of another as each orbits out of range.

The smaller component is the PID (Personal Identity Device), strapped to the tagee's ankle, to which the GPS unit (if not already integrated with the PID see below) may transmit and which in turn communicates with the regional monitoring centre by cellular radio, the terrestrial matrix used by mobile telephones.

Technically, the GPS unit may either store the continuous information it is receiving, to be downloaded on demand at the end of any day, as is to be required by the current pilots; or, alternatively, it may instantly pass on its information via the tagee's PID for transmission there and then to the monitoring centre for the centre's own storage or, if required, continuous scrutiny.

The GPS unit's sustained electronic vigilance is, however, demanding on electrical power. Its battery therefore requires daily re-charging. This is done via a charging unit plugged into a normal power socket in the tagee's home.

The hitherto familiar type of GPS unit is worn by the tagee separately from the PID, usually on the belt, while the PID is permanently strapped to the tagee's ankle and cannot be tampered with without alerting the monitoring authority to this violation. It is the tagee's responsibility to wear or carry his/her GPS unit constantly, except when re-charging its battery or bathing, when he or she is to remain within a few feet of it. If the tagee becomes separated from the GPS unit, the tagee s PID automatically alerts the monitoring authority to this violation, and appropriate action such as arrest will follow.

Already available is a device, commercially entitled the Blutag, combining the GPS unit and the PID in a single unit strapped permanently in all circumstances (i.e. sleeping, bathing etc ) to the ankle, and itself as small as a pc mouse. The battery of the Blutag is, similarly, re-chargeable daily from a regular wall socket daily for a period of at least half-an-hour, while the wearer, having plugged himself or herself in, sits alongside still wearing the tag.

The piloted tagees are thus to be held to a strict regime of compliance with the basic requirements. These are:
a) regular re-charging of the GPS unit/Blutag battery
b) permanent wearing of the twin device
c) a pattern of movement consonant with the requirement of the court.

About half of those currently curfew tagged have allocated to them, by order of the court, a superviser. Under the GPS pilots, there is no person-to-person supervision but, rather, a more impersonal supervision by what the Home Office calls multi-agency management teams, or Youth Offending Teams , charged with evaluating compliance, and presumably encouraging it. (The Probation Service, somewhat demoralised just now, and HM Prison Service have recently been combined as the National Offender Management Service NOMS ¬ but, awaiting appropriate legislation, are still operating independently. Root-and-branch reorganisation is foreshadowed.)

1c - THE CURRENT STATE OF TRACKING TAG PENAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH

In the early days of the serving of a GPS tag sentence, a fairly high level of failure on the part of the offender to comply with the three requirements noted above was expected, in the light of US experience. This is mostly on account of indiscipline. Notwithstanding a measure of non-compliance, however, new crime committed by GPS tag-wearers under the surveillance regime is likely to be rare. Part of the purpose of the English pilots has been to indicate which categories of offenders comply most reliably with tracking tag rules.

GPS signals do not penetrate underground. Where comprehensive surveillance is required, as it usually is, tagees can be forbidden to travel underground. Moreover, certain formations of dense high-rise buildings can weaken or eliminate GPS signals. In such a situation, however, the PID will continue sending its signal by the cellular radio network to the regional monitoring centre. Given that the point where the GPS signal has been impeded by high-rise buildings is determinable, the approximate location of the GPS tagee can thereafter be imdicated by the PID cellular radio signal: the vertical locating, as it were, being superseded by the horizontal. A tagee in a high rise building can be required, on receipt of a beep signal, to place himself in a situation where a GPS signal can be received, for the verification of his whereabouts. In any case, of course, a tagee's signals will be picked up again as soon as he leaves the GPS-occluded area. Heavy cloud can weaken a satellite signal but not eliminate it.

Under passive tracking (see above 1b), the practice in the US hitherto has been for the movements of the tagees to be reviewed retrospectively at the end of the day while the GPS unit is being re-charged and a land-line telephone can be used (to save the power of the portable PID) to transmit that day's record. At the same time, where necessary, the tagee may receive telephoned guidance from the monitoring authority or superviser. The GPS unit can, however, be polled at any time of the day or night by the monitoring authority to warn an offender against violation, for example, or tell him or her to contact the monitoring centre.

Under 'hybrid' tracking, any breach of locational conditions by the tagee will instantly alert the monitoring authority to the breach, resulting in either the transmission of a warning signal to the tagee or, of course, arrest.

Setting a so-called 'hot zone' which a tagee is forbidden to enter can be programmed by the monitoring operator in minutes. Such 'hot zones' can cover areas surrounding sites deemed by a court to be potentially conducive to criminal behaviour by the offender in question, such as Tube stations or crowded emporia for those with convictions for pick-pocketing, public houses and the like for those convicted for drunken behaviour, the residences of children deemed in danger of abduction by an aggrieved parent, the premises of former sexual partners in fear of molestation, and so on.

The monitoring Companies allocated in October 2004 the role of conducting the pilots were the same as those already contracted by the Home Office to run the continuing Curfew tagging programmes in the respective regions in England and Wales where the selected pilots fell. Contracts were renewed in April 2005. The Greater Manchester and the Hampshire pilots are now operated by Securicor, the West Midlands pilot by Premier. These two companies operate the current electronic monitoring contracts (GPS + Curfew) for the newly-defined 4 areas of England and Wales (see below 2a) until 2010. Both companies are multi-national commercial operations, involving British and American management; and use state-of-the-art equipment and software developed in the US and in Britain.

An internal Home Office of July leaked in August 2005 revealed that out of 178 offenders who had by then been released on the tracking tag under the current pilot schemes, 83 had been recalled to prison, 29 had completed their sentences successfully, and 66 were in the course of the their tracking tag sentences. The Home Office commented on what the document reportedly described as poor results by stressing that the handling of the technology was improving. We ourselves would add that notions of success or failure are not appropriate in the context of the pilots. The technical capacities and limitations of the GPS tracking tag are thoroughly known already. The management of the device by the monitors calls for familiarity and practice, currently under way; and the response to the application of the tracking tag by various categories of offenders is open to testing, which is also under way.

The Tracking Tag (mooted by ourselves to the Home Office in 1981) was first introduced in Florida in 1998. Although many states have now entered the field, Florida remains the biggest player. With many functions of the US penal and 'correctional' system devolved to State, District or County levels, federal statistics are not available nor, indeed, easily calculable on the use of electronic monitoring, whether on a curfew or tracking principle. As of late 2004, however, the approximate number of tracking tagees in the US was 7000. This represented 5.8 per cent of the total of (approximately) 120,000 under electronic surveillance at any time in the US. This percentage was forecast to have risen to 14 per cent (say, 16,800) by the year 2006, in the light of the fairly recent US Defense Department move to end their degrading of satellite GPS signals by which, until 2003, precision of location was deliberately denied to non-defence users.

The Tracking Tag in the US is made a condition of bail to men and women awaiting trial, and to those on parole. Indications of the effectiveness of the Tracking Tag are obtainable piecemeal. Here are two samples. In the year 2000 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1141 people awaiting trial were tracking-tagged. Of these, 7 failed to appear in court, representing a substantial reduction in the average level of bailee absconding. (Of these 7, 6 were apprehended within 48 hours.) In 2003 the State of Florida reviewed the rate of re-offence while on the tag by the 15,000 offenders who had served tracking tag sentences up to that date. This was calculated at 1 per cent, a figure to be compared with 63 per cent rate of re-offence over an equivalent period by similar offenders left to their own devices after release from jail.

1d - THE POTENTIAL

The relaxation of constraints on GPS satellite precision, referred to above, has narrowed the location of a Tracking Tagee to a radius as tight as 2 or 3 metres and never looser than the size of a small flat. This of course obviates many opportunities to cheat the surveillance. It reinforces public confidence in the system.

Quite apart from potential penal and rehabilitative advantages, the Tracking Tag offers substantial economic benefit over custody. In round figures, the accepted American calculation puts the cost of keeping an offender in jail at nearly $50 a day and the cost of electronically monitoring and handling an offender on the Tracking Tag at under $10 a day. The English pilots, working to a £3m budget for start-up costs and evaluation over a full 12 months and involving a total of 120 offenders at any time, works out at £68 a day. In sustained operation, there is no reason to suppose the British experience will differ much from the American, and that a cost reduction of tracking tagging over custody will be in the order of a factor of 5.

2 - THE SPREAD OF THE CURFEW TAG

Meanwhile, the Curfew Tag has become a significant adjunct in the handling of offenders in North America, in Britain, and in several other countries worldwide It is used both as an alternative to prison and as a means of monitoring compliance with home curfew orders often handed down by the courts. The English and Welsh judiciary were mostly fairly slow to awake to the potential and significance of the tagging option. Since around 2003, awareness on the part of judges and magistrates has markedly increased, and interest is accelerating.

2a - IN ENGLAND AND WALES

i - HOME DETENTION CURFEW

In early 2005, the Curfew Tag was being used on approximately 4 per cent of those in England and Wales who would otherwise be in jail. In broad figures, without the use of the Curfew Tag those serving sentences in England and Wales would number 77,000 (a further 12000 being held in custody awaiting trial). As it is, approximately 3500 convicted offenders (as of November 2005) were serving the last part of their sentences out of jail, on release under the Home Detention Curfew (HDC) scheme. HDC allows for low-risk offenders, sentenced to prison for three months or longer, to be selected by a panel of assessors, usually chaired by the offender's prison governor, for early release on a home curfew of not less than 9 hours in the 24 and not more than 12. A typical HDC will cover 12 hours daily, running from 7pm to 7am. Such early release under HDC is calculated on a pretty flexible pro rata basis against the length of the original sentence, with a maximum of 18 weeks on the tag available to appropriate offenders sentenced to four years or longer, to a minimum of 2 weeks available to those sentenced to three months.

Since 1999, HDC has been brought into play nationally by the Home Office more or less unashamedly as a handy and inexpensive method of freeing up prison spaces during a period when courts - since the mid-1990s - have tended to impose longer sentences and when, in some categories of custodiable offending, crime has been rising. Nonetheless, HDC curfew tagging has worked effectively in three respects:
* in easing the severe pressure on prison spaces and diminishing the often highly unsatisfactory recourse to the use of police cells for prisoners on remand;
* in financial a saving; and
* rehabilitatively, by achieving a high level of compliance with the curfew regime, and the personal discipline that implies.

The large majority of HDC parolees - 83 per cent - complete their curfewed sentences without significant violation. Those who fail to do so are returned to prison and do not get a second chance.

The last, rehabilitative, aspect is of course the most significant, in that the word implies a self-willed curtailment of criminal behaviour. An offender on HDC is indeed able to re-offend during daylight hours. That said, his or her daily conduct is under varying degrees of personal supervision, either by the assigned probation officer or the monitoring agent concerned, or both. An offender with a record of drug dealing, for instance, would warrant close scrutiny.

The HDC offender's opportunity to commit crime undetected during the day is small and the detection rate of any crime committed is likely to be high. The rate of conviction for crimes committed by offenders under HDC is 2.1 per cent. It is reasonable to suppose that such a figure is close to the reality of crimes actually committed, and that undetected crime is minuscule This 2.1 percentage should be set against the commonly accepted estimate among probation workers of over half of ex-prisoners re-offending within the first few weeks of (untagged) release from jail. (The re-conviction rate of released prisoners in England and Wales is 59 per cent within 2 years of release.)

In August 2004, the Opposition leader, Michael Howard (a former Home Secretary), announced the Conservative Party's intention to scrap the HDC scheme should his Party be returned to power. Such is easier promised than done. To return the current 3500 or more HDC curfewees to jail at a stroke would be impossible: the cell beds would not exist; nor the staff to handle them. At least two large new jails would have to be built, at a cost of £220m each, and a time-scale of three years. We expect the Opposition's stance to be reviewed under whichever new leader of the Conservative Party emerges in later 2005.

As Home Secretary from 1993 to 1997 Mr Howard's slogan of 'prison works' was indeed borne out in that strict sentencing and longer sentences kept more potential criminals out of circulation for longer periods and crime indeed fell. The effectiveness of such a policy had been demonstrated elsewhere, as for example, New York City under the administration of Mayor Giuliani. But there is little firm evidence that longer sentences act as a deterrent (except in so far as repeated offenders may grow old in prison and tire of law-breaking and its consequences). Meanwhile, there is no evidence that use of electronic monitoring across a wide range of offenders would not be more effective than prison: effective in curtailing recidivism in both the shorter and the longer term, at a far lower cost in money, alienation and human dereliction. Indications are perceptible (if not yet convincing) that experience of life on the tag in some areas of criminal propensity does reduce re-offending, when set against the record of similar offenders released from jail.

For tagging purposes, England and Wales from April were divided into five Criminal Justice Areas: West Midlands and Wales, covering Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, West Mercia; London and Eastern, covering Beds, Herts, Cambridgeshire, and all of East Anglia; North East and North West, including Manchester, Merseyside, Lancashire, Durham, Cleveland, Cheshire, Cumbria and Northumbria; East Midlands, covering Yorkshire, Humberside, Leicester, Notts and Derbyshire; and South-East and South-West. Each of these regions is monitored from a single centre, the first two are run by Premier; the last by Group 4-Securicor.

Reservations concerning HDC come from two directions: those who see the option as being 'soft on crime' (i.e. insufficiently punitive, especially in the popular perception); and those working within the system who regard sentences foreshortened to a matter of weeks as being too brief for any prison-based programmes designed to engender behavioural change to take place effectively.

As to national organisation, the Home Office has established its Electronic Monitoring Team in Horseferry House, Westminster, as a wing of the National Probation Directorate. Scotland has entered the field of electronic monitoring (referred to locally as 'restriction of liberty' orders) rather later than England and Wales. Scottish Parliamentary legislation was expected to allow for the introduction of an equivalent of an HDC (early release) system from early 2006. Northern Ireland has yet to start tagging in any form.

ii - CRIMINAL JUSTICE TAGGING

Some 6000 further adult offenders 'on the tag' in England and Wales as of November 2005 were serving their electronic monitoring orders not in the context of early release from prison (HDC) but as a sentence standing alone or as an adjunct to a community service order or as a condition of Parole. Of those tagged in this so-called 'Criminal Justice' category (as distinct from HDC), the largest single group (43 per cent) are being tagged on home curfew for failure to pay fines. (Courts have a right to waive a fine; but in practice, tag sentences are not served in lieu: the fine is still payable.) Approximately 20 per cent of adults serving (non-HDC) tag sentences are doing so as an alternative to custody, and 22 per cent as an adjunct to a community service order handed down by the courts.

A small proportion of curfew tagging orders are issued as a bail condition, currently somewhat more than 100 adults and nearly 600 'juveniles' (under-18's). The 1997 Crime (Sentences) Act allows for curfew tag sentences on offenders in the 10-15 age group, for a maximum of 3 months: more than 800 such offenders were under curfew from between 2 to 12 hours a day in early 2005.

Voice verification, by landline phone from the curfewee's home, is slowly gaining acceptability by courts in England and Wales as a dependable means of confirmation of the presence of an offender in his or her home, in fulfilment of a curfew order. (Voice verification may now be considered foolproof. In so far as it is simultaneously possible to verify both the offender as speaker and the location of his or her telephone - whether by landline from a known location or by GPS - we must expect an expanding role for this technology in penal or correctional affairs.) So far, some 900 offenders, most of them bailees, have been monitored by voice verification alone since the technology was introduced in 2001.

In England and Wales, a maximum tagging sentence is 6 months, in Scotland a year. Maximum daily 'criminal justice' tag penalties are for 10 hours, minimum 2 hours. There is no restriction, however, on the hours for which a bailee may be tagged daily.

In the field of Youth Justice, there are currently 8 different curfew programmes involving tag monitoring in use in England and Wales for the handling and so-called treatment of (currently some 650) offenders under 18. These are managed by the Home Office's Youth Justice Board, under Intensive Surveillance and Supervision Programmes (ISSP). The Crime (Sentences) Act of 1997 permits the use of the curfew tag for offenders as young as 10, in order to verify their presence at home at certain periods. The sound intention is to establish a discipline of calm and regularity. In practice so far, the youngest tagged have been in their early teens, and the bulk of them in their middle and late teens. All will have offended repeatedly. In practice, the tag restraint has been slackly handled, with repeated violations left unpunished, leading to a widespread discrediting of the system. It could also be that the tag restraint is administered too late. American experience is that, on young offenders, the tag induces behavioural change most successfully on those of the (sometimes very) young who have not already been contaminated by the effect of custody and where there is a passably stable home. Most of the (British) ISSP tagees will have had seriously disrupted backgrounds or mental health problems, or both. All are supported by sustained supervisory attention, often on a one-to-one basis. Under the ISSP, the tag is being used to monitor compliance with curfew orders designed to break persistent offending habits. The curfew periods therefore often fall in the daytime. The purpose is to save as many offenders as possible from being locked up in the Secure Centres for the under 15s ands the Young Offender Institutions for the 15 to 20-year-olds, both of which have the malign consequences of institutionalizing the youngsters, quite possibly for evermore.

Despite the high rate of violation, any analysis of the effectiveness of tag-backed ISS Programmes for young offenders published in September 2004 indicated the frequency of re-offence in the year following ISSP to have fallen on average by 43 per cent compared with the year prior to undertaking ISSP.

Meanwhile, a comparable series of programmes (ICCP)has been making widespread use of similarly targeted tag regimes for adult offenders.

2b - THE US AND WORLDWIDE

In the US - a country where some 5 million offenders at any time are under one or another form of supervision within the community - the electronic tag is an established contributor to the correctional system and has been in use as a penal restraint in all States since the early 1990s. The Tracking Tag is now shaping to supersede the Curfew Tag, and in an expanded role. The caseload of electronically monitored offenders is today estimated at around 120,000. This year, the highest profile American tagee, wearing her electronic monitoring bracelet, has been the lifestyle guru Martha Stewart.

Tag sentences are more commonly handed down to sex offenders, drunk drivers, and those convicted of domestic violence. The refinement of Tracking Tag technology is set to extend tag use. Curfew tagging has been successfully applied across the spectrum: as an adjunct to bail, in lieu of a jail sentence, for early parole equivalent to the British HDC, and also as a means of monitoring curfews imposed alongside community penalties. Tag sentences range widely from a couple of weeks to many months, and in some cases years where the original offence has been serious.

Elsewhere, Sweden has led continental Europe in the use of the Curfew Tag, with the tag option credited with reducing the prison population by more than 20 per cent. It is widely applied to drunken drivers who would previously have gone to prison. The average age of Sweden's tagees is over 30, which makes for an unusually high level of compliance. Curfew tagging programmes are in operation in various provinces of Canada and states of Australia, and also in New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Argentina, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Israel, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Various other Governments or national departments of Justice are assessing the tagging option.

3 - PROSPECTS

Since its formation in 1982, the OTA has fulfilled its task of keeping politicians, the judiciary, the forces of law and order, the media, and appropriate public figures alert to the potential of electronic monitoring as a means of dealing with criminals and reducing crime in a civilized society. We have further provided sound guidance on what is technologically feasible and available, and politically manageable. What we have achieved so far by participation in radio and television programmes, articles and letters in the press, briefing media correspondents, attending seminars, and enlightening politicians, civil servants, and members of the judiciary, and by issuing our occasional overviews, of which the latest is normally available on the web (www.offenderstag.co.uk). We are motivated by no more than a desire for penal advance on the premise of human redeemability. In terms of punishment, it should be remembered that the tag can be made punitively restrictive and yet, in contrast to the prison cell, it can preserve the offender's chance to restore his/her role in life and self-respect which are so commonly lost in prison, and allow the offender to hang on to what there may be in the way of a home and family life, generally recognised as crucial to rehabilitation.

Over more than two decades we have witnessed a heartening shift in the manner in which others concerned with crime, punishment and human rights have responded to the ideas and proposals which originated from us and, of course, continue to be propagated by us. We have seen hostility overtaken by goodwill by leading voices in many fields probation, the police, other penal reform organisations, civil libertarian groups, and political parties. We note that the American Civil Liberties Union has come out in public support for the introduction of GPS tracking of offenders. We have seen the Economic and Social Research Council of Birmingham University conducting, under Dr Mike Nellis, a series of well-balanced seminars involving leading figures from a wide range of disciplines and skills - criminological, sociological, technical, judicial - on the realities and shorter and longer term prospects of electronic monitoring.

The future role for the tag is assured; what deserves sustained consideration is its best and fullest use so as to diminish crime and diminish recourse to the penitentiary.

The Home Secretary of the time, David Blunkett, member of a Party whose Front Bench spokesmen were energetically deriding tagging in the 1980s, was in September 2004 welcoming the launch of the Home Office pilots for the GPS Tracking Tag as a 'prison without bars'. These three words portend a seismic shift in penological thinking - as significant, it may be claimed, as the shift towards building penitentiaries nearly two centuries ago to supersede the gallows, stocks and dungeons which preceded them as the favoured means of handling and deterring offenders.

We look to the day when, as a principle of justice, we confine prison as punishment to those of the guilty who have no wish or intention to live lawfully and as a disabling restaint to those manifestly incapable of doing so.

November 2005

THE OFFENDER'S TAG ASSOCIATION WOULD APPRECIATE BEING CREDITED WITH ANY QUOTATION OR OTHER USE OF THIS OVERVIEW