Faulty tags leave hundreds of early release offenders unmonitored

Published on Saturday 29 December 2007 20:54

HUNDREDS of electronic tags fitted to criminals as a condition of early release from jail are failing every year.

Figures show that almost 300 tags a year failed because of problems including their batteries going flat, a loss of contact with the monitoring equipment in offenders' homes, or damage by the criminal.

The technical problems are in addition to the hundreds of cases a year in which offenders breach the conditions of their tagging orders.

Just last month the Scottish Government announced an expansion of the use of tagging, which will for the first time see criminals with sentences of more than four years given tags as part of their terms.

The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that in the year 2005-06, there were 285 incidents where the tags failed. Over that period, there were 987 tagging orders issued.

The incidents included:

&#149 185 cases where the batteries lost power.

&#149 45 cases where a person damaged either the tag or the monitoring unit.

&#149 A further 11 incidents where the aerial of the black box in the home was faulty.

&#149 Another 33 incidents where the tag signal was too weak to be picked up, or where they stopped transmitting altogether.

The figures did not include the additional 315 cases where the straps holding the tags on offenders were tampered with.

Bill Aitken, the Scottish Tory justice spokesman, said: "I'm becoming more and more concerned about the operation of the tagging scheme.

"Everything that the Scottish Government does on the justice front is predicated on emptying jails and it appears the expansion of the tagging scheme to more kinds of offenders will simply lead to more breaches as they try to avoid sending people to jail."

However, the Government has insisted that not all the failures show crimes are being committed and that tagging still has its place in the criminal justice system in Scotland.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "A breach does not necessarily equate to reoffending – they relate to failures to comply with all the conditions of the sentences. In the case of RLOs (Restriction of Liberty Orders] for example, the breaches reported to the courts include those offenders requesting a change of address.

"We want to detain the dangerous but treat the troubled. We will come down hard on serious and dangerous offenders but believe less serious offenders should be paying back their debts to society – not adding to society's bill for their bed and board. Our recently announced action plan to revitalise community penalties will help take this forward."

Scottish courts have been able to impose tagging orders since May 2002. They restrict an offender's movements for up to 12 hours a day, and are used to keep an offender in a specific place or bar them from entering a particular house, street or town. If an order is broken the offender is sent back to court, where an alternative punishment may be imposed.

Ministers recently scrapped plans to use tagging to monitor suspects who were allowed out on bail.

In October 2005, Callum Evans hacked John Hatfield, 23, to death outside his Glasgow home while Evans was wearing an electronic tag following a conviction for assault and robbery.

The tag had been wrongly set, meaning it did not alert the authorities when Evans left his home. Last year Evans received a 20-year jail sentence.

Judge Lord Hardie criticised the tagging system for its potential to give offenders a false alibi. Evans had said he was tagged and had been in his house at the time of the killing, but he was caught on CCTV. Hardie said that had there been no more evidence linking Evans to the killing, the faulty tag could have been used to support an alibi.