3 Managing electronic monitoring
12. Home Detention Curfew is some £70 cheaper,
per day per prisoner, than prison. In order to realise the full
economic benefit of HDC, prisoners should be released on the first
day that they are eligible, i.e. their eligibility date. Half
of the prisoners included in the National Audit Office's sample
who were eligible for HDC were, however, released up to 7 weeks
after their eligibility date (Figure 4). The Prison Service
allowed 10 weeks for the HDC assessments to take place; although,
when prisoners were given short prison sentences, prisons had
as little as one month in which to carry out all the assessments
prior to the eligibility date. The National Audit Office
found that the mode (most common) time taken for the assessments
was 27 days; therefore, it should have been possible to have met
the eligibility date in many cases. Better planning of the assessment
process could have helped prisons to complete assessments prior
to prisoners' eligibility dates. The process could be streamlined
if courts carried out eligibility assessments for HDC when they
imposed a short prison sentence, particularly since they based
their sentencing decisions on the same information that affects
eligibility for HDC.[15]
Figure 4: Only 48% of prisoners eligible for Home Detention Curfew were
released on their eligibility date
Source: National Audit Office sample of cases
13. If offenders on Adult Curfew Orders breach their
curfew conditions, they are returned to court. This took an average
of 11 days from the time that the breach was reported. The Home
Office is working to try to speed up the process by improving
communication at each stage of the process and by making it easier
for the courts to hear the cases, but they do not have a target
for returning offenders to court when they had breached their
Adult Curfew Orders.[16]
14. The Home Office originally let three contracts
to run electronic monitoring services. In April 2005 it re-tendered
the service and awarded new contracts to two of the three original
contractors. Contractors fit tags, supply and maintain equipment,
monitor compliance with the curfew conditions and report breaches
(Figure 5). Until recently, the only information the Home
Office had on the performance of the contractors was supplied
by the contractors themselves. As a result it was unable to carry
out any independent monitoring or auditing of contractors' performance.
The Home Office has since gained real-time access to the contractors'
databases which it can use to monitor the contractors' performance
in any on-going curfewee case. Performance information could be
published in order to incentivise the contractors, provided that
this information did not undermine the security of electronic
monitoring.[17]
Figure 5: The contractors have to meet a number of requirements
1. Except when a court order is made on the day the
curfew starts in which case the contractor has an extra 24 hours
Source: National Audit Office
15. The Home Office has made two ex-gratia payments
totalling £8,100 to two offenders returned to prison after
allegedly breaking their HDC. They were returned to prison because
the straps holding the monitoring equipment to their ankles had
been damaged. The offenders claimed that their tags had been damaged
accidentally and that, therefore, they had been returned to prison
incorrectly. At that time the Home Office's policy was not to
retain damaged equipment for appeals and as a result, when the
offenders appealed, they could not prove whether the tags had
been damaged intentionally. The Home Office paid £5,400 to
one offender and £2,700 to another in recognition of their
additional time spent in prison. The Home Office is going to change
its policy so that contractors retained damaged equipment for
three months after the recall decision.[18]
16. The contracts included performance deductions
for failing to meet particular conditions. Group 4 Securicor Justice
Services incurred around £100,000 of deductions during 2005/06,
mostly at the start of the new contracts in April 2005 and mainly
for failing to call offenders within 15 minutes if they were absent
for over 5 minutes. Payments to Serco Home Affairs were reduced
by £41,000 in 2005 for failing to meet performance targets;
e.g. reporting Adult Curfew Order breaches on time. Contractors
had improved their rate of reporting breaches from slightly over
half at best, to 96% on average from the start of the new
contracts in April 2005 to February 2006. This could only be explained
by tougher financial penalties for failing to report breaches
on time, incorporated into the new contracts. The contracts stated
that contractors should visit curfew addresses at least every
28 days to check the equipment. Group 4 Securicor carried out
their tests when they visited addresses for any other reason and
claimed that this meant equipment was checked on average every
15 days. The National Audit Office's tests, however, showed that
some 30% of equipment had not been checked for over 28 days. The
contracts included performance deductions for the service not
running at all times, but not for failing to check the equipment
at least every 28 days.[19]
17. The Home Office has successfully negotiated a
40% reduction in the price of the contracts when it renegotiated
the contracts with two suppliers. The Home Office was unaware
of the extent to which the companies' ethical backgrounds and
practices were taken into account in the procurement process or
whether they might be overstretched by their multi-national activities.[20]
15 Qq 14-16, 97-98 Back
16
Qq 1-2 Back
17
Qq 3-6, 32 Back
18
Qq 42-44; Ev 13 Back
19
Qq 7-9, 10-11, 36-41, 35, 45-67, 99; Ev 13-14 Back
20
Qq 68-88; Ev 14-15 Back
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