The Mirror’s Sophie Huskisson writes about her experience wearing one of the Ministry of Justice’s GPS ankle monitoring tags for the day – and how it freaked her out
It is not the first time I have been a guinea pig for one of the Ministry of Justice’s tagging initiatives. Last time I took one of their sobriety tags to the pub where I successfully triggered the alcohol monitoring device after a dedicated session of boozing.
This time I took a GPS tag that tracks an offender’s location for a spin. Ministers yesterday unveiled the biggest expansion of tagging in British history, with thousands of extra domestic abusers, thieves and burglars to face electronic monitoring.
Criminals will be live-tracked using real-time surveillance by the probation service under a plan backed by £700million investment by 2028/29. Every prison leaver will be put on a tag from the end of the year, while there will also be a huge expansion of people on community sentences given tags.
There are two clear emotions I felt when wearing a tag: Shame and accountability.
READ MORE: ‘I wore an alcohol tag like a criminal for a day – but I was rumbled at the pub’
Embarrassment flooded over me as I wore my new ankle bracelet as I passed MPs in the corridors of Parliament or travelled on the tube to my friend’s birthday drinks in the evening.
My thoughts were spinning as I wondered whether people were questioning what I’d done to break society’s rules as they saw the visible punishment on my leg. “Did they just shoot me a second glance?,” my anxiety would ask.
Accountability comes through the physical reminder of the tag – and that you are under surveillance at all times. When I went to get my results from the experiment at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) offices – which for an offender would be the probation service – the eerie Big Brother-esque reality of it all set in.
An official probed me: “Why were you hanging around a school for a long time last night?” I quickly explained that my friend’s house is next to one and it was his birthday. While I had a valid explanation, the interrogation freaked me out.
Officials said this is the sort of questioning they’d employ on risky criminals, such as sex offenders or child abusers.
As part of my test, I ventured to St James’s Park which for the purposes of my experiment was an “exclusion zone”, an area a criminal is restricted from entering because, for instance, their victim lives or works there. A map provided to me by the MoJ showed a clear path of my route – including several red stationary points where I slowed down to admire the lakeside birds.
Restriction zones to lock offenders into specific areas have also been introduced.
To further protect victims, a £5million pilot will introduce proximity monitoring technology that will alert a third-party service when offenders convicted of crimes such as domestic abuse and stalking are near a victim. Officials are still hashing out the details but the victim could be required to carry a device or download an app on their phone to track their location in relation to the offender’s.
I also tested out the MoJ’s acquisitive crime scheme, which sees an offender’s location data mapped against unsolved crimes. Officials say the project leads to a 20% crime reduction and will be rolled out to all 43 police forces before the end of this Parliament.
The MoJ made up a fake theft incident that supposedly happened in St James’s Park when I’d been passing through. In the real world, the data would be passed to police and I would be investigated as a suspect.
Challenged on the obvious possibility of people being linked to crimes they didn’t do, ministers insist the tagging data won’t be the only evidence used by police and is a tool to aid investigations. They also said the scheme works the other way round, with police able to rule out suspects from crimes if they know they were not in the location.
The Government said it will recruit at least 1,300 new probation officers over the next year to carry out its plans, with low-risk offenders to receive less regular supervision – allowing staff to focus on those that pose the greatest danger. It is hoped the plans will reduce probation staff’s unmanageable workloads, with around a third of scheduled meetings having been cancelled between 2023 to 2025.
Prisons and probation minister James Timpson said protecting victims and keeping the wider public safe are at the heart of all his justice plans. “We don’t want to let down victims,” he told The Mirror.
He said cutting reoffending – with tagging proven to slash the rates of it – is vital to this. Pointing to stats showing 80% of offending is reoffending, Lord Timpson continued: “The reason why reoffending is too high is because the prison and the probation service has not been invested in for far too long and people are leaving prison, often with nowhere to live, often still with drug and alcohol problems and without a job.
“All the statistics say that good supervision, good use of technology, having someone in a house when they leave (prison)… all of that means that they’re less likely to reoffend and that’s the business I’m here to do.”
Victims groups welcomed the tagging expansion, with Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman saying it is “a necessary step in helping to rebuild a probation service that has been under immense pressure for years”. Separately, a £5million pilot was yesterday announced offering victims of serious domestic abuse a meeting with prosecutors ahead of Crown Court trials, where they can ask questions about the courts process to ease their anxiety.