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Home Detention Curfew
3.30 pm
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Jack Straw): With permission, Madam Speaker, I should like to make a statement about an extension of the electronic monitoring--or tagging--of offenders.
On 30 July, I announced to the House a number of measures, building on our manifesto commitments, to protect the public and to establish a criminal justice system that is fair, swift and effective in tackling crime and disorder. Many of the measures--including new community punishments--will be provided by the crime and disorder Bill that will come before Parliament shortly. Others, such as automatic life sentences for second-time serious sexual and violent offenders and seven-year mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers, were brought into force on 1 October. Work is also in hand to bring the Prison Service and the probation service closer together.
The Government are pledged to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. Ex-prisoners are plainly much less likely to reoffend if they have settled into work or if they are actively looking for a job or have a clear prospect of a job. The welfare-to-work programme will guarantee every young person who has been out of work for more than six months the opportunity to work or train. I have ensured that ex-offenders are targeted as a special group within the welfare-to-work programme.
Protecting the public and maintaining public confidence in the criminal justice system are my primary goals. Prison must be used for serious and persistent offenders. That is why I discharged our manifesto commitment to audit the resources of the Prison Service. As a result, I have provided an extra £43 million to help with the additional population pressures that we inherited and which were not adequately funded by the previous Administration. Since May, the prison population has risen by more than 3,400 to 63,000, an increase more than double the April 1997 predictions of my predecessor. To cope with that increase, I have authorised the building of four new prisons to provide an additional 2,400 places.
We must also give the courts a wider range of options on tough community punishments in which they--and the public--have confidence. Those can now involve greater deprivation of liberty by the use of new technology. Therefore, I am setting out today, to the House and to the public, new action that I am proposing in the use of tagging.
It may be helpful if I give some of the background information. Over the past 10 years, there has been much interest in the use of electronic tagging to provide 24-hour supervision of offenders who have been curfewed. The first trials, in 1989, which were of curfews imposed as a condition of bail--not a sentence--were not a success. The equipment simply did not work as intended.
The Criminal Justice Act 1991 provided for a new penalty of a curfew order enforced by electronic tagging. The previous Government delayed the implementation of those provisions until 1995, and then only introduced them in three trial areas--Norfolk, Greater Manchester and Berkshire.
On Tuesday, I published the report of the second year of the trials. To begin with, sentencers were very cautious about using their new powers, and only 83 orders were
made in the first year. However, as it became clear that the equipment really did work, and that the orders were effective, more and more use was made of them. In the second year, 375 orders were made. In the last four and a half months alone, a further 269 orders have been made.
There are three reasons for the increase in sentencers' confidence in tagging. First, the equipment has proved absolutely reliable. When an offender is tagged, it really is possible to tell, second by second, whether he or she is complying with the curfew. Not only are absences instantly noted, but any attempt to tamper with the equipment is detected immediately.
Secondly, the two contractors have performed well. Every violation of the curfew conditions is followed up by properly trained and managed staff.
Thirdly, sentencers are using tagging as a high-level penalty, in many cases for offenders who might otherwise have been sent to custody.
Therefore, it is clear that the technology can offer substantial benefits for victims and the public. The trial areas for curfew orders made under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 are now being extended into four new areas: West Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and the Middlesex probation area, which covers the London boroughs of Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Hillingdon and Hounslow. In addition, from January 1998, in the pilot areas of Greater Manchester and Norfolk, the courts will be able to impose a curfew order, enforced by tagging, as a community punishment on 10 to 15-year-olds, on fine defaulters who would otherwise be sent to prison, and on persistent petty offenders.
I turn to how I propose to use electronic tagging in respect of those who have been in prison and are very near to the end of their sentences. Those who are sentenced to prison typically have lived disordered, irresponsible lives. They are poor at making sensible decisions about their own futures or those of their families. In prison, of course, they do not have to. However, the moment prisoners come out of prison, they have to make critical decisions about what they do with every moment of the day; whether they drift back into crime, and into the company of their criminal associates, or whether they try to bring order into their lives.
Tagging has a key role to play here. If prisoners who are serving short-term sentences are tagged towards the end of the custodial period of their nominal sentence, they can be given the opportunity to structure their lives more effectively and be swiftly brought back to prison if they breach the tagging conditions.
The research into the first year of the trials showed that offenders see curfews enforced by tagging as a very severe restriction of liberty--just as magistrates and judges do. Some offenders have said that they found that the self-discipline required to complete such a curfew order made it harder than prison. Tagging also provides opportunities for offenders to take proper responsibility for working or looking for work, for keeping their families together and for maintaining self-control.
The case for introducing an element of tagging into the last part of a short-term prison sentence is very strong in any event, but it has been reinforced by the recent rise in the prison population. No one wants to see an unnecessarily overcrowded prison system, and it would be the height of irresponsibility not to take advantage of
modern technology to help prevent that. The alternatives are bound to be at the expense of constructive prison regimes, and at the expense of improving the prisoners' prospects for resettlement--in other words, at the expense of the law-abiding public.
Therefore, I have decided to seek Parliament's approval to impose electronic monitoring on selected short-term prisoners in the last two months of their sentence. The orders will be called home detention curfews, and the relevant powers will be sought in the forthcoming crime and disorder Bill.
Home detention curfews will be available for prisoners who have received sentences of more than three months' but less than four years' imprisonment. They will be tagged for between two weeks and two months, according to the length of their original sentence. Currently, under the Criminal Justice Act 1991, such prisoners are automatically released at the halfway point of their sentence. All those prisoners will in any event shortly be back in the community.
There will be no automatic entitlement to tagging. The Prison Service will in each case conduct a risk assessment. If the prisoner fails it, he or she will continue to serve the sentence in prison until its halfway point, as now. The prison governor will set the place and times of curfew, in consultation, where needed, with the probation service. It will usually be 12 hours a day and could be more, but will in no case be less than nine hours a day.
That will enable the prisoner to have a specified period each day in which he or she can adjust to living in the community, while still facing a restriction on liberty for a major part of the same day. The curfew conditions will be in addition to the supervision requirements with which anyone with a nominal sentence of 12 months or more must comply.
If a prisoner breaches the conditions of the home detention curfew, he or she can immediately be returned to custody. As with the present trials of curfew orders enforced by tagging, the monitoring will be provided by private sector contractors, and there will be an invitation to tender in due course. Our aim is for the scheme to be operational in 1999.
At the heart of all my policies as Home Secretary is my commitment to provide better protection for the public and for the victims of crime. I am ready to use every measure at my disposal to honour that commitment. We now have a real opportunity to use modern technology to provide a much better transition for carefully selected prisoners from prison into the community. With the support of Parliament, I intend to take that opportunity.
Sir Brian Mawhinney (North-West Cambridgeshire):
I thank the Home Secretary for his courtesy in letting me have an early view of his statement.
Seldom has the House listened to more verbiage to disguise such a massive U-turn in Government policy. I want to apologise to the Home Secretary, because in our debate on policing in London last Friday I suggested that he was only part owner of his job and that he shared it with the Chancellor of the Exchequer; I was wrong: the Chancellor now sets Home Office policy by himself, and the Home Secretary simply does what he is told.
"Tough on crime" never meant anything, given the Labour party's record in opposition; now its meaning is clear: it means soft on criminals. New Labour's language
means anything that it decides that it will mean. According to the Home Secretary's statement, being tough on crime means being willing to put the public at risk in order to save money.
I welcome the Government's conversion to the importance of tagging. Why is the Home Secretary now in favour of tagging, when only a few years ago his party said that tagging was
How many prisoners does the Home Secretary expect to be freed each year if his proposals are enacted? How much saving in public expenditure does he expect to achieve? Will he confirm that that money will be clawed back by the Treasury? He mentioned victims, in passing, only twice, brazenly suggesting that this move would add to their protection. How exactly will victims feel more reassured and safer after the early release of offenders from prison?
In this country, courts decide sentences in individual cases. Will the Home Secretary confirm that he plans to breach that principle by substituting governors' judgments for those of the courts? If the Home Secretary wishes to assist criminals to re-enter society--that is a laudable wish shared by both sides of the House--why has he decided to release them two months early with tagging, rather than amend the law to require that they are tagged for the first two months after their release? We all know the answer--the Chancellor of the Exchequer has told him to save money.
The Home Secretary says that the Prison Service will conduct a risk assessment in each case. Who is the Prison Service in this context? Is it prison officers? Is it their union? Is it governors? Is it bureaucrats? Is it Mr. Tilt? Is it the Prisons Minister? Who is it? Who will be responsible to the House when the curfews are broken?
Given the limited nature of the tagging pilots thus far, and of those proposed, how will the Home Secretary reassure people throughout the country that they can have confidence in an untested scheme?
The Home Secretary has consistently refused to put in place mandatory minimum sentences of three years for career multiple burglars. Will he confirm that such criminals will be eligible to take part in the scheme, providing, of course, they have not been sentenced to more than four years? Will he confirm that violent and sexual offenders sentenced to four years or less will also be eligible to take part in the early release scheme?
Will the Home Secretary also confirm that most people sentenced to six months--who would usually serve only three months--by the courts, will, with time on remand and this scheme, effectively be able to walk free from the court, despite its decision that they should serve six months? How does he believe that that will reassure the public? Indeed, will he confirm that he does not believe in honesty in sentencing?
"a dangerous and irrelevant concept . . . wrong in principle. It has enormous implications for civil liberties".--[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 18 December 1990; c. 274.]?
Will he confirm that this is another U-turn by his party and that tagging was an initiative of the previous Government in the context of sentences imposed by the courts?
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