Home Office has no idea what tagged offenders are doing

Over the past few years we have had a steady stream of Home Office initiatives to apparently control offenders. One of those initiatives has been the introduction of electronic tagging. this is generally used for people released from prison early under license, or often for those on bail.

The idea is pretty simply, you tag an offender and the tag is set-up so that if the offender leaves their home between certain times it bleeps somewhere and the Police know that the person is breaking the rules of their license/bail.

There has been much speculation on what the effectiveness of such tagging actually is. There is also the argument that it is used primarily to release prisoners to free up prison space.

Now, given the very "new technology" nature of tagging you'd think the Home Office would be monitoring what those who are tagged are up too. You'd think that they'd be keeping track of how many people tagged commit crimes when tagged wouldn't you? Well they don't.

In fact, the Home Office has absolutely no idea how many offenders that have been tagged are actually committing crimes when tagged. According to the Home Office minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, crimes by offenders that are tagged "are not currently reported".

This probably shouldn't come as a surprise though, back in 2005 the BBC reported that the Home Office conceded there was no evidence that tagging lowered re-offending. The only difference now is the Home Office has conceded why there is no evidence, they haven't bothered gathering any.

You have to ask yourself the question, if you're going to introduce new technology which is intended to control offenders outside of prison, would it not make sense to see if that technology was actually creating effective outcomes? If the Home Office had not driven by headline-grabbing news management for so long perhaps they might have?