Tuesday 1 November 2016

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)

37 comments:

  1. No! According to the female governor of Eastwood park prison..just heard on local news..the answer is to 'give abused women longer prison sentences to help undo decades of violence' !!!!! Is this a late halloween joke or am I imagining what what I heard! She must be completely institutionalised herself to believe that locking up abused women for even longer periods in a frequently violent atmosphere is going to help them.overcome decafes of abuse. Did she acknowledge the drugs problem in the prison because she must know it is awash with drugs! Unbelievable stupidity fir her to encourage magistrates to give longer prison sentences when prisons are experiencing unprecedented increase in drugs, violence, self harm and suicide. Tagging and better community sentences, plus better services for women who have experienced domestic violence would make more sense.

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  2. Anyone who breaks the perfectly good laws of this fine upstanding country should be forced to wear a an electronic device which law-abiding folk can access via an App on their mobiles (except when they're driving) in order to instruct the law-breakers to complete useful tasks for the benefit of the community. The requests would stack at a G4S comms centre & be distributed according to whichever crim was next available. Control & Command at its most efficient.
    (NOMS please note this is not a serious suggestion; its just a pisstake).

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  3. Tagging, labelling, branding or simply segregating 'them' from 'us' is just fine & dandy, isn't it? Some don't think so... R4's Analysis programme broadcast last night:

    "Should we place more trust in prisoners to help them change their lives? "Trust is the only thing that changes people," says Professor Alison Liebling, the director of the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. But, asks Lucy Ash, how can we encourage trust in prisons that are overcrowded, often understaffed, and blighted by rising rates of violence? Prisoners are locked up because they broke trust, and on the wings distrust, rather than trust, is an essential survival skill.

    And yet Professor Liebling's latest evidence surprisingly shows that ultimately it is only staff-prisoner relationships built on trust that ensure better outcomes. "Values grow virtues", she argues. Treating prisoners with the same values as other people - dignity, respect, trust - will help them turn their lives around."

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    1. Exactly, good support and supervision is what works well, but the MoJ killed that when they did away with 'supervision' with the new Offender Management Act.

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  4. Having been involved in junior and open age football for 18 years now, I have on many occasions felt I did my best social work with the men and boys I have coached. So, it fills me with horror to hear those subject to these tags will not be able to participate in football, rugby, hockey or kick boxing, 'for their own safety' as for many of the young men I encounter, this is the only pro social, healthy activity they engage with; where they get praise and get to do something they are good at! I've coached many lads on tags, or who are only available to play alternate Saturdays, as the Attendance centre calls them in on the others. Removing their capacity to achieve and mix with non offenders, ex offenders, just alienates them all the more!

    Also, I don't see magistrates, judges or governors buying into this, save for a small group of people for whom it would be the right and proper response, to protect people. I fear it'll be used as an add on to the sentences they already had in mind.

    Then there is the moj/noms! I rang them a few weeks ago, to check that it would be deemed proportionate and necessary to include a total of 14 hours in a licence? The general rule, not exceeding 12 hours doesn't apply to rotl! Why? I was advised that overnight rotl is to rehabilitate, to provide opportunities for clients to take part in purposeful activity. I was told in no uncertain terms that if my lifer is a high risk of harm, he shouldnt be eligible for rotl, and if restrictive licence conditions were required, he should not be deemed safe, for any type of release. I found this to be an interesting point of view, so described where I was coming from. Parole Board at last oral hearing asked that I provide opportunities for client to demonstrate through rotl, his capacity and willingness to comply with supervision/licence conditions and mappa and VLU insisting on all manner of restrictions and exclusions! The representative of the moj/noms was clear in his response 'rotl should not be used to satisfy the requirements of mappa or the Parole Board or the Governor when assessing risks when approving rotl? I put the phone down and laughed out loud, what planet are they on? My colleague had no idea, as far as he was concerned, until a prisoner achieved low risk, he should not have access to rotl, he should not require ANY bespoke licence conditions!

    Sorry, I digress, my point is that this GPS sentence is not the panacea being peddled, and as long as there is no joined up thinking in noms/moj-I can only ever see it as the belt to match the braces of existing sentences, which is little more than a money making exercise. If following the pilots, there is any positive outcomes I will pickle my walnuts!

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  5. A great big question that should be asked about GPS tagging, is when someone on a tag commits an offence, where will the shit fly?
    Will it land at the door of the supervising probation officer, or on the lap of the private company employees monitoring the offenders movements for £7.20 an hour?

    'Getafix'

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    1. It certainly won't sully the Westminster bubble.

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    2. The buck will stop at probation, and probation managers/directors will bend over and say "yes please", and then haul a poor innocent probation officer through an investigation process!!!

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    3. The way I read it, there is no role for probation, with police and the em providers enforcing them!

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    4. There is a role when they are on licence. I agree, if not on licence then probation are cut out of the loop. A link in another comment gives an example and we know the police have been after our work for years.

      https://www.theguardian.com/publicservicesawards/digital-innovation-tags

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  6. It will help me track down my homeless offenders who are on the increase! Have just met with one such person.on my way to lunch and had a good chat and got him a coffee and sausage roll!

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    1. 1. They are not 'your' offenders.

      2. Because some many offenders are homeless or in unstable accommodation is partly why this would not work.

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    2. Get over yourself! 'My' is just a term, like 'my caseload' ...have a go cause someone is bothered!

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    3. Ever asked the clients if they like being referred to as 'your offenders' and 'your caseload'? No, I didn't think so but I'm sure your training was reflective enough to realise labelling should be avoided and 'my clients' is probably better. You're not alone, many make this mistake even though they themselves tend to prefer to be called 'my probation officer' over 'my jailer', 'my bitch', etc.

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    4. I think you need to get a life!

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    5. Why, because you can't be corrected?! Haha

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    6. 2030 no wonder probation is shafted your the sort of twerp that gets us nowhere. pathetic.

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    7. No that's because of probation officers like you that think they know it all when really they don't.

      I never said I worked for probation.

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  7. Oral questions in House of Commons to Justice ministers who sound as evasive as ever and not to see any urgency in resolving the crises in prisons and probation

    http://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/a3f2184d-db95-4bcb-af4e-086ee8b0bd43

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    1. Autism not neurodiversity of interest at House of Commons Justice questions - probation of no interest prisons are mentioned but there seems no urgency to deal with crises

      https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2016-11-01/debates/F1A09A8D-5207-4E0A-A648-D8F9C3383F23/Justice

      https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/14523223_1015970555192124_7156221367858329390_n.jpg?oh=fa98f22cac9f13563bef1da10ec5ed90&oe=58CD8947

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    2. I watched justice questions and increasingly I find I dislike Liz Truss more and more. All will be sorted out when she publishes her white paper she keeps repeating, although she seems in no hurry to get a move on.
      I also noticed the discomfort when the minister was asked directly about reoffending figures under TR.
      Open Democracy have an article about Ms Truss today, I feel they share my dislike of her,but it's hard to have faith in a justice Secretary that wrote in a book in 2011,

       “we are not ashamed to say that prisons should be tough, unpleasant and uncomfortable places. That’s the point of them".
      https://www.opendemocracy.net/openjustice/prisons-places-of-harm-and-dehabilitation


      'Getafix'

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  8. Two hours charging time means the technology being used is cheap crap. Offenders already have an excuse to go under the radar, "my battery ran out when I was sleeping". This is why previous pilots failed because offenders have to voluntarily agree to keeping it charged and know they cannot be penalised when it is off unless somebody physically visits their house to check in they're in.

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    1. What happens to those who can't afford to feed the overpriced electricity meter?

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    2. Nothing happens because they will not be able to enforce tag failure for electricity running out and dead batteries. Tags will only be put on those that are financially stable. This is just another way that our justice system benefits the rich and hinders the poor.

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  9. This is about the government rehashing old news a bid to earn revenue from tagging. It doesn't work because the technology is not advanced enough and this is common knowledge. A quick google and here is a probation pilot of GPS tagging in 2012 which obviously didn't continue for the same reasons of cost, technology and practicality.

    https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/publicservicesawards/digital-innovation-tags?client=safari

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  10. How many of our offenders regularly run out of credit on their electricity meters and are unable to charge these. Do they end up back in Court for being poor or are these aimed at the few rich people who can 'afford' to avoid prison?

    Discuss.

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    1. ... and how many of these pilots are being made to work by police/probation topping up offenders electricity meters, following them around to keep the units charged, etc. The pilots are a sham but I've no doubt the press release will describe unprecedented success.

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    2. Yes, freedom, justice, safety, all available for those who can pay, but not for those who can't.

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    3. Or sanctioned by the job centre.

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  11. Never mind all this. Bigger things are occurring as E3 spreads it's cancerous claws. In our office, PSO's with no experience at all have pinched our caseload. They have had NO training at all and will not have any for months aside from online workbooks. They are out of their depth completely and working with medium risk cases, who were all high risk cases up to very recently. SFO responsibilty should this occurr, which it almost certinly will is left ambiguous. Meanwhile we are being flooded with brand new cases from another office. No workload for ARMS assessments or address checks. Now extra hidden workload as we have been told we need to oversee and train the PSO staff but the case points go on our their workload. We are being expected to mentor them as well. What can we do. Train others to take our roles over eventually. They are trying to kill PO roles in my view over time. No PSR's as all done in Court. No longer supervising cases in prison soon, hardly any new cases aside from online sex Offenders who don't have any chance of completing Programmes. It's all going to hell in a handcart before our eyes. E3 will do for the NPS what TR has done for CRC's.They are planning the demise of Probation Officer's I am sure.

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    1. Any advise on what to do appreciated. Is this happening everywhere?

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    2. It's happening in SY the view from management is let them get on with it and us hard pressed POs don't care anymore we just do what we can inan impossible situation dictated by Noms It's dreadful

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    3. With all responsibility, including, typing, administration, for both NPS and hmp - those damn rotl 007,008,009, our job to send for and collate responses from vlu and police.Responsible for our own development, which requires a log into equip, every day, at least to soak up new information, and hear of changes in how we do things; in addition, we are being asked to train pso's and co-work with trainees! I'm good, but I'm not f**king Paul Daniels!

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    4. Refuse to train or mentor PSO staff. This is not in your contract and unless you are a probation trainer it cannot be a "reasonable instruction". Hand them the case file and let them get to work, and if they ask for help tell them to goto their managers.

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  12. If you search for 'prisons crisis' or similar there are stories everywhere a ross England & Wales. This from up North...

    Copeland MP Jamie Reed says the prison service is in “crisis” after a dangerous criminal escaped from HMP Haverigg and went on the run.

    Meanwhile, the lack of information from police has been branded as unacceptable – after the force fell silent for eight hours while a major operation was launched.

    Mr Reed said: “This weekend’s incident, involving an escapee from HMP Haverigg, highlights the fact that the government cannot ignore the crisis in our prisons any longer.

    “On this government’s watch, we have seen prisons becoming dangerously overcrowded and understaffed, with rising levels of violence and drug abuse. I have today tabled a series of written parliamentary questions to ascertain the number of prison escapes in England and Cumbria since 2010, and the number of prison officers employed in England and Cumbria in the same period.

    “I have also asked what steps the government are taking to ensure that they support police and prison services to inform and reassure the public in a timely manner during an escape incident.”

    The escape drama unfolded in Haverigg on Friday afternoon as residents heard rumours of an escapee. As police helicopters and riot police scoured the area, residents were left without any concrete information for hours as details of the incident failed to be communicated to the wider public.

    Millom town councillor for Haverigg, Janice Brown, said: “I don’t think it’s acceptable at all. We know people who work up at the prison who got messages out to tell us to lock our doors and I kept looking for messages from the police but there wasn’t anything.... Its not acceptable – not when there’s someone dangerous on the loose.”

    A spokesman for Cumbria Constabulary said: “Keeping the public safe is paramount to policing operations and informing the public of any potential danger is a key aspect in the way we operate. We understand the importance of factual and timely information being issued to the public and we worked closely with the prison service to provide this.”

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    1. Why does every pronouncement from someone in authority never specifically address the issue under consideration, but merely mouth something bland and vague, whilst looking into the middle distance? It indicates both a studied unwillingness to acknowledge (what may be unravelling) with no commitment to actually do anything.

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  13. When the government imported Lie Detectors, they where seized be the customs because they were not CE approved. The MOJ retrieved them arguing that they were Defence Equipment not subject to CE approval. The truth is that they are None Intrusive Medical Monitoring Equipment and need CE approval as such. If anyone is using one the CE mark should be on page one of the manual.

    Probably GPS tracking equipment used to monitor the location of an individual is None Intrusive Medical Monitoring Equipment, the ones that measure alcohol in perspiration certainly are.

    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.

    This implies that a Lithium Ion Battery is in use, intrinsically very very dangerous due their combustibility, attaching one to a persons ankle, probably breaks health and safety law, its foreseeable that you are fixing a firebomb to their ankle.

    The Samsung Galaxy fires where not caused by a failure in design, but a very very small oversight in quality control specification. Incredibly microscopic particles of metal in the electrolyte caused the fires. The more modern higher capacity batteries all fail the nail test, drive a nail into them and they catch on fire. Banning certain activities does not lead to safety. My local roads are so full of potholes its only a matter of time before one causes me to crash on my bicycle. Imagine picking yourself and finding your ankle is on fire.

    No one is above the law including the MOJ, if they fail in their duty of care they must be prosecuted.



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