Is Tagging the Answer?

The MoJ has long harboured the expansion of tagging as a 'magic bullet' solution to all its prison overcrowding problems and cost reduction plans and my guess is it will feature heavily when Liz Truss has to answer Parliamentary questions this week. Here's Alan Travis writing in the Guardian on Friday:-  

GPS monitoring tags trial could help cut rising prison population

Up to 1,500 offenders are to be fitted with satellite-tracking tags in a Ministry of Justice trial intended to provide a viable alternative to custody and stabilise the relentless rise in the prison population. The 12-month satellite-tracking trials, already under way in two parts of England, come as the latest prison population figures published on Friday show that inmate numbers have risen by more than 1,000 in under two months to 85,108, a new record.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said the rapid increase in inmate numbers since early September was unusual and is placing additional pressure on an overstretched system already experiencing record levels of violence, self-harm and suicide.

The GPS monitoring tags, which are fixed to the offender’s ankle, will be used to enforce exclusion zones such as a particular address, a place such as a town or a football ground, or a number of locations such as train stations, airports or city centres. The tags can also be used to create an inclusion zone that the offender is not allowed to leave, such as a building, city or even country, and can be used to ban them from associating with other people who are also tagged. Up to 50 exclusion or inclusion zones can be created, which can be limited by time, day or a particular date.

The tags are designed to be difficult to remove and require two hours’ charging every day. The official guidance says GPS-tagged offenders will be banned from “unsuitable activities”, including water sports such as diving and surfing, as well as contact sports such as football, rugby, hockey and kickboxing, because they risk hurting themselves or damaging the tag. They may also have problems visiting some hospitals as the tag may interfere with medical equipment.

Ministry of Justice guidance on the details of the trials published on Friday says that a monitoring centre, staffed 24 hours a day, records the movements of tagged offenders, reports alerts and responds immediately to breaches. The trials are taking place in eight police force areas across the Midlands and south-east England.

The pilot scheme is available to encourage courts to make greater use of bail rather than prison remand and community and suspended sentences, and as a sentence in itself. They will also encourage prison governors to make greater use of early-release schemes, prevent recalls of those already out on licence, and could lead to the parole board ordering the release of more inmates on indefinite public-protection sentences.

Plans to introduce satellite tracking of offenders were first announced 12 years ago, but official trials in 2007 raised the question of whether the benefits could be delivered at a price that justified a national rollout of the scheme. The renewed attempt to introduce the next-generation tags was first raised by David Cameron in his speech on prison reform in February.

The MoJ guidance says “there is real potential for electronic monitoring to act as a tool that could help stabilise demand on the prison estate. It will be critical for decision-makers that we demonstrate that GPS tagging is a viable and useful alternative to custody. The pilots will also test whether satellite tags do modify the behaviour of offenders.”

Case studies cited by the MoJ include a convicted football hooligan who is banned from the Madejski stadium in Reading on match days. The tag will warn the offender if he approaches the exclusion zone around the stadium and alert the monitoring centre if he goes into the off-limits zone.

In a second example, the GPS tag can be used to keep a convicted burglar out of jail but allow him to keep his job, even though his workplace is in the middle of a number of residential areas where he was caught burgling. The GPS tag would allow him to go work on a prescribed route, but if he wanders off into any of the nearby banned residential areas the monitoring centre is alerted.

The first pilot area covers Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Leicester and the West Midlands, and the tags are being trialled for court-imposed bail, community and suspended sentence orders and in parole board cases. In the second pilot, covering Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, the satellite tags are being used in prison-recall cases, early release and home-detention curfew cases, and parole board cases.

--oo00oo--

Professor Mike Nellis has written extensively on the subject of tagging, most recently in an article for the British Journal of Criminal Justice March 2016 and here is a taster:-

ELECTRONIC MONITORING AND PENAL REFORM: CONSTRUCTIVE RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF "COERCIVE CONNECTEDNESS" Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice, School of Law, University of Strathclyde

Abstract 

Alongside its strategy for privatising the probation service, the Ministry of Justice in the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010-2015) hatched a plan to upgrade from radio frequency electronic monitoring (EM) to a much larger scale, and solo use of GPS tracking. The plan failed, but was revealing nonetheless about the government’s policy intentions, to transform the community supervision of offenders more according to commercial-technological criteria than evidence-based penal ones. It is unclear if the new Conservative government, and new Minister of Justice, will retain the same misplaced confidence in an all GPS approach to EM and make a second, better finessed attempt at “disruptive innovation”. It is vital however that at this point in debate on the future of EM in England and Wales that probation interests and penal reform bodies abandon their traditional aloofness towards EM. They must recognise that it is merely an affordance, a customised coercive form, of the ubiquitous digital connectedness that characterises our age, and engage more actively in shaping the wise use of monitoring technology. Failure to do so will guarantee the continuing – but unwarranted - domination of rightwing, neoliberal narratives about the purpose, direction and scale of EM use. Other models, better aligned with community justice, already have prototypes in police-based Integrated Offender Management schemes, but are badly in need of professional and political champions.

Conclusion 

The "New World" all-GPS EM strategy devised by the Conservative-led Coalition Government, informed by Policy Exchange and led by Chris Grayling was a commercial, technological and penal fiasco and there is nothing to be regretted about its passing - if indeed it has passed. The fact of its failure, in this iteration at least, is less important than what was revealed by the plan itself. That said, its failure serves to confirm Nicola Lacey's (2013) argument that abstract, reified visions of neoliberal practice can't be implemented without viable institutional structures and networks which are capable of carrying them. The Ministry of Justice will doubtless work to improve these structures and networks; whether it will revive or revise the original vision of GPS, or something more modest and sensible, remains to be seen. 

Michael Gove, the present Justice Minister, is no less neoliberal in outlook than his predecessor, but may have more talent for finessing the implementation process. Like Grayling, he is a committed marketiser, an ambitious disrupter of public sector provision, a confirmed Brexiteer unlikely to be receptive to cautious European models of EM, and opposed to strategic reductions in the size of the prison population (Gentleman, 2016). Marshalling an evidence-base of some sorts, consulting more with relevant interests and establishing GPS pilots are all sensible in themselves, as well as means by which the Ministry of Justice can regain lost legitimacy in this area of policy-making. Nonetheless, any sign of continuing commitment to an all-GPS system or the bulk monitoring of 75,000 offenders per day as envisaged by Policy Exchange will be evidence that commercialtechnological factors rather than penal factors are still driving the vision and implementation strategy, and must be contested. 

But more than issue-specific contestation is needed: the bigger picture must be appreciated. The temporary implementation hiatus in EM policy creates an opportunity for penal reform bodies to reconsider their position on EM in England and Wales, and become more than simply reactive to it. Such groups need to engage in constructive resistance, shaping not rejecting, on the understanding that EM is now such an integral element in a digitally connected world that it is neither going away nor growing less important, and that unless they attempt to shift the centre of gravity in public and professional debate, policy will continue to be dominated by untrammelled right wing interests. Historically, and from experience, penal reformers know, more than most, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing, but for want of an informed understanding of the digital technoculture in which EM is rooted, they have come close to letting this happen. 

Penal reformers need to enter the EM debate with (to use a somewhat passé term) a "hacker ethic" in mind, a sense that EM technologies are not solely owned by government, that they can be appropriated and deployed to better, more creative ends than those who control the dominant narratives about them have thus far been prepared to concede. It is precisely because the various modalities of EM can - among other things - add a flexible element of control to community supervision that it is capable of enabling viable alternatives to custody - something well understood by most European probation services - and the fact that Gove has already decided not to exploit this strategic aspect of it is an own goal on his part, and an open one for penal reformers. 

The challenge for probation interests and penal reform bodies in England is pressing, because as Hucklesby et al. (2016) have intuited, in relation to Europe as a whole, a new surge of enthusiasm for EM seems imminent, indeed already underway, in which it is likely that the Ministry of Justice will wish to remain at the fore. Hucklesby (2016) herself has quite aptly likened this surge of interest to the opening of Pandora's Box, out of which nothing good comes, but a more commercial, socio-technical account can be given of what lies behind it. Over the past two years the Bank of America, the Bank of England, the World Economic Forum and sundry economic commentators have been forecasting a vast expansion of automation and robotics in global businesses which will have far-reaching consequences for many middle class occupations, including legal and welfare professions, particularly those whose working practices and processes have become so standardised that they can readily be replicated (and improved) by smart machines (Susskind & Susskind, 2015; Treanor, 2016). One aspect of this upcoming tech transformation is the socalled “internet of things”, which will further normalise the idea of ubiquitous environmental sensors constantly feeding real-time data to monitoring centres for analysis and profiling, both aggregated and individualised, and it is inevitable, given past trends in the adoption of technology, that law enforcement will seek in some way or other to harness its potential. 

GPS tracking devices are essentially internet-linked mobile sensors, and many aspects of EM systems are already automated: the larger the system the more algorithmic processing of events is required. While there is no simple, mechanistic relationship between "the rise of the robots" (Ford, 2015) and “the internet of things” (Greengard, 2015) and EM as such, they both give further symbolic and practical credence to the value of "non-human" approaches to increasing efficiency in and control over a range of business, administrative and governmental processes. Coupled with that, many EM manufacturers are nested in and overlap with the same digital ecosystems and research and investment networks, and the same corporate futurist imaginaries from which automation, robotics and remote sensing are arising, and will be emboldened by the same trends, which modernising, efficiency-seeking governments will facilitate and align with in greater or lesser degree. 

It is tempting, even plausible, in retrospect, to see the English Ministry of Justice's efforts at simultaneously upgrading EM and downgrading probation from 2012 onwards as an early, localised expression of these broader global developments, a step towards “nonhuman” (or less human) offender management. Knowledge of these developments, and the momentum which will flow from them into and through the "penal field", necessarily raises the stakes in debate on EM, because the dismal spectre of "the probation officer" going the same way as the lamplighter in the age of electrification looms even larger. Soft “people skills” might well survive in future work with offenders – because empathy can’t be automated – but not (unless it is fought for) as the basis of organised professional employment, more as lower status work such as part-time mentoring. Thus, all future critical engagement with EM in Britain, indeed in Europe, must now be grounded in a more informed understanding of the affordances of the digital world, and of the potential and limits of "technological solutionism" more generally (Morozov, 2013). The focus must be on constructively resisting excess in EM – and using it wisely - rather than a wishful, anachronistic belief that it is still simply a discrete and peripheral intervention, easily derided and readily contained, and without capacity to disrupt existing penal arrangements – especially probation services.

Notes

 1. Two representatives of potential bidders for the third contract, initially uncertain of its commercial viability, separately told me that in private meetings at the Ministry of Justice in 2013 officials tantalized them with a figure of "about 75,000 per day" as the anticipated, eventual size of the GPS market. Tipped off by Napo, an associate business editor at The Independent phoned the Ministry of Justice media office to confirm the 75,000 per day figure, which they did - only to withdraw it a day later. I wrote "Upgrading EM, Downgrading Probation: reconfiguring offender management in England and Wales" (Nellis 2015) specifically to expose and critique the Ministry of Justice's ambitions for GPS, once I had found out what they were. I am grateful to Ioan Durnescu, the editor of the European Journal of Probation, for publishing it so quickly. 

2. Both US pioneers of prototypical thinking on EM in the 1960s and 70s, the Schwitzgebel brothers and Joseph Mayer, were confident that monitoring technology would inexorably - and massively - reduce the need for imprisonment in the future. In England, journalist and EM champion Tom Stacey believed the same. Despite all experience to the contrary, such techno-utopianism dies hard. It misunderstands the enduring symbolic and material power of physical imprisonment. Only if monitoring technology and supportive supervision regimes are fused with sustained political will and operationalised by appropriate institutions might there be such a transformative effect on penal practice, and with good or ill results (or both), depending on how the technology was used (see Nellis, 2013). 

3. The term "hacker" did not originally denote activists who illicitly accessed and exposed computerised data, but activists who would put the burgeoning affordances of the coming digital society to creative and democratic use, not least because, without informed political intervention from below, the new technologies could so obviously be used to bolster corporate and governmental authority. The term "hacker ethic", which has some affinity with the "community justice" emphasis on action-from-below, was shortlived, but the sensibility lives on and, in respect of EM, can usefully be commended to probation interests and penal reformers (see Himanen, 2001). 

(The full article is available via BJCJ website)