Good afternoon, Mr. Sorenson. Thank you for that welcome.
Although I'm speaking from Glasgow, I am going to talk to you about electronic monitoring in England and Wales rather than in Scotland. As I'm sure you're aware, they are two separate jurisdictions and they use electronic monitoring in slightly different ways. Scotland uses it on a proportionately smaller scale and hasn't used it in as diverse a way as England and Wales has used it.
England and Wales started using electronic monitoring in 1989. It was the first European country to pilot electronic monitoring, the first European country to take up the American practice of electronic monitoring, as it seemed at the time.
I've been interested in it since then, although for the first six years of my interest in it I was actually hostile to it, as were most people with a probation background. I changed my mind in 1996, more for ethical reasons than for empirical ones, because I had come to the conclusion that we ought to experiment with new forms of offender control in the probation service, the better to reduce the use of custody.
Using some statistics from June 2011, I can say that since 1999 nearly three-quarters of a million people have been subject to electronic monitoring in England and Wales, and 760,000 people have been monitored with electronic monitoring. This is largely the conventional and commonest form of electronic monitoring, radio frequency, and it is used to monitor people's presence at home. It's a form of house arrest, a form of home detention. It's the largest scheme in Europe. Other European countries are using electronic monitoring quite regularly now, but no other country uses it quite as extensively as England and Wales has done.
We've used it at all stages of the criminal justice system, from the bail at the pre-trial detention to post-release, and we've used it with both juveniles and adults. On any given day in England and Wales you will find 23,000 people who are subject to electronic monitoring: 34% of them are on bail, 52% are on a court-ordered community sentence, and 14% are released on licence from prison. The vast majority of those are short-sentence prisoners on an early release scheme, but some of the 14% are also much higher-risk offenders who are on parole.
The use of electronic monitoring in England and Wales is increasing. There was a 10% increase in its use between 2010 and 2011. All the signs are that our government in England and Wales is committed to its continued expansion.
What do we do well in England and Wales? We tend, by and large, to use electronic monitoring for just short periods, up to a maximum of 12 months for adults and up to six months for juveniles. We tend to limit the period of time during the day when someone can be subject to electronic monitoring to between two hours and twelve hours, and usually it's nearer twelve hours than two hours. The amount of daily confinement on electronic monitoring can be and often is much higher when you're on bail, meaning on a pre-trial detention scheme.
All the pilot schemes in England and Wales were researched, except for its very small-scale use in parole, which has never been researched. When the pilot schemes were first researched, the studies all found sufficient evidence--not incontestable evidence, but sufficient evidence, in the government's eyes--to say that the measure was cost-effective enough to proceed further with it. By “effectiveness”, they by and large meant compliance for the period of time that you were subject to electronic monitoring. The rates of compliance tended to be high; people did stay indoors as they were required to do, because they knew that the monitoring centre was in contact with their presence in the home.
Only one piece of research has ever been undertaken in England and Wales to check whether electronic monitoring has any kind of post-completion effect and whether it affects recidivism over a longer period of time, meaning the standard two-year period that researchers tend to use. Unsurprisingly, it found that electronic monitoring was no different from any other measure in reducing recidivism when the age of the offender and criminal record of the offender were held constant.
That should have been no surprise to anybody, because electronic monitoring as a technology is not by itself something that tries to change behaviour in the way, say, that probation tries to change offenders' behaviour by examining their attitudes and behaviour.
At best, electronic monitoring works by deterrence, and we know from a raft of research that deterrence by itself is a pretty poor way of trying to change one's behaviour. The cost of electronic monitoring is actually a complicated thing to work out when you look at government's expenditure on it. We deal with the private sector to deliver this service in England and Wales, and the price of electronic monitoring has varied over the years, very crudely put, in terms of the amount of bulk buying that the government has done with the companies. I'm not going to talk too much in detail about that, because it takes a long time to talk about it.
What I am clear about is that the governments regard electronic monitoring as value for money. We have a body called the National Audit Office in England and Wales. It did a very thorough study of community penalties and the early release scheme and concluded that both of them, particularly the early release scheme, were undoubtedly measures that saved the criminal justice system significant millions.
Electronic monitoring is embedded in the criminal justice system in England and Wales largely because it is deemed to be a cost-effective measure. Now, one can argue about that. I'm not saying that I necessarily accept that conclusion, but that is the view of the governments, and it cannot be said that they have not looked into the issue. They have produced publicly available documents about the expenditure on electronic monitoring and they're satisfied that the expense is justifiable.
What don't we do so well? Well, in England and Wales the use of electronic monitoring is largely a stand-alone measure. Electronic monitoring by itself is not integrated into other measures, such as probation or other rehabilitative packages that you might use with offenders in the community.
The use of stand-alone electronic monitoring might be a defensible thing for people on bail, who innocent until proven guilty, and there is no justification for trying to change their behaviour at that stage of the criminal justice process. We have had a crisis of remand imprisonments, and using electronic monitoring to address the problem of the excessive use of remands into custody is probably a good thing. In this situation it may defensible to use it as a stand-alone measure for bail.
However, when it comes to using stand-alone electronic monitoring as a community penalty, despite the best intentions of the government 20 years ago to use it as a high-tariff penalty, it has become a low-tariff penalty, and it's not a significant means of reducing the use of prison when you use it low tariff, by itself, on people who might otherwise have got another community penalty or a fine.
Stand-alone measures of electronic monitoring may also be defensible as a means of early release, depending on what you think the purpose of early release is. Is it a way of easing the reintegration of the prisoner back into society, or is it just a quick and cheap way of getting people out of prison to save money? I think, by and large, that we have used it as a quick and cheap way of getting people out of custody slightly earlier than they would otherwise have gotten out.
We have had arguments about early release. If we let people out on early release on electronic monitoring, should we not also be providing some kind of supportive service to them? At the moment, we don't provide that supportive service, and I think people are left to draw the conclusion that what's going on is primarily a very crude use of electronic monitoring to shave a few days, a few months—minimum of 30 days, maximum of 135 days—off a custodial sentence, which undoubtedly saves the government money, saves the prison service money, and enables the throughput of the prison system to be a bit greater than it might otherwise have been.
The use of electronic monitoring for early release has been controversial in the media, because releasing prisoners early is always controversial. Some of the worst media coverage that we have had has been in relation to early release.
We also have some integrated uses of electronic monitoring, and these are the kinds of uses that I prefer.
We have an intensive support and surveillance package available for high-risk young offenders, of which electronic monitoring is one of half a dozen components. In principle, that's a good use of electronic monitoring. Although it adds an element of control that might not otherwise be there, the essential thrust of these packages is towards the rehabilitation and support of high-risk young offenders.
We also use electronic monitoring in an integrated way when we use it with parole. It isn't mandatory on parole; it's a discretionary requirement in a parole licence, but with a number of high-risk offenders, including sex offenders, electronic monitoring can add something to the process of sustaining them in the community when they come out of prison.
What I know about that I tend to know anecdotally, because that's the one aspect of electronic monitoring in England and Wales that has not been subject to a publicly available evaluation.
England and Wales use the private sector to deliver electronic monitoring. That was a political choice in 1996 and 1999. It was a political choice to run the 1989 pilots as well, but when we were thinking about making electronic monitoring into a national scheme, the British government decided it was going to stay with the private sector and not use the probation service to run electronic monitoring.
As a result, electronic monitoring is delivered on five-year contracts to the justice ministry. Every five years we have a retendering exercise to see whether we'll change the private companies, which are currently G4S and Serco. We review every five years to see whether we want to change the companies or change the technology, and a retendering exercise is going on as we speak, at this moment in time. We are in one of those five-year periods now.
The advantage of retendering from the government's point of view is that it can galvanize changes of practice by the private companies and it can generate competition and force them to keep the costs down.
There are undoubtedly some good and decent people working in the private sector, and I have known many of them for a good number of years, but in my view, using the private sector as opposed to the probation service to deliver electronic monitoring has made the integration of electronic monitoring into rehabilitation packages more difficult than it might otherwise have been.
In 2004 we had a very tragic case in England and Wales. A young man who was subject to one of these intensive supervision and support packages murdered someone in the course of a robbery. The resulting inquiry showed quite clearly that poor communication between the statutory agency and the private agency was a factor in why he managed to evade the kind of control that his particular sentence was supposed to subject him to.
A couple of years after that, our probation inspectorate did its very first formal inspection of the arrangements we have for delivering electronic monitoring in England and Wales. It's an excellent report; it's one of the best reports you could read about how we operate electronic monitoring in England and Wales. It didn't have a brief, or a mandate, to question whether using the private sector was the right way to go about it, but in a very gentle civil service sort of way, it did question this arrangement.
We had a brief pilot of GPS tracking--that is, using satellites to track offenders--in 2004 to 2006. The pilot was targeted on sex offenders, as GPS often is, and on the group of people we call “persistent and prolific offenders” in England and Wales. These are high-risk thieves, by and large. They are often drug users who steal on a very regular basis to support their habits. They may be people who are involved in violence on a very regular basis. Consistent and prolific offenders commit high amounts of volume crime, which it is in everybody's interest to see reduced very rapidly, particularly when people come out of prison and are likely to continue doing high-risk volume crime. We also used GPS tracking on young offenders in this 2004 to 2006 period.
For a complicated set of reasons, we didn't continue with GPS. It was not because it was totally ineffective; there were anxieties at the time about the cost of GPS tracking, but the cost of GPS tracking is a lot less now than it was even in 2006.
In any case, we didn't continue with GPS. I think it was the political intention of the government to continue with GPS when they started the pilot in 2004, but in 2006 they had changed their minds.
However, even though that pilot was not continued, there are three small-scale pilot schemes using GPS running in England and Wales at the moment, all with persistent and prolific offenders. There's also a GPS scheme that is used in the National Health Service to monitor the movements of patients from a secure psychiatric unit in South London when they leave the hospital for short periods of time.
The use of electronic monitoring in respect of immigration is not great in England and Wales. I'm not even certain at this moment whether or not it is actually being used. A pilot scheme was run in parallel to the GPS tracking scheme in 2004-2006, and all three available electronic monitoring technologies were used in that pilot—ordinary radio frequency, home detention, GPS, and voice verification—but whatever research was done into that, the research was never made publicly available. I heard that the numbers were very low and that there was nothing significant to say.
What I also heard was that it was being used to give asylum seekers a reason for not travelling very great distances to the reporting centre they would otherwise have to report to pending deportation from the country. It was a way of allowing asylum seekers and their families to stay at home and be monitored electronically, rather than travelling maybe 50 or 60 miles and having to arrange for bus and train fares.
I have to say that I don't personally find that an objectionable use, but it has never become large scale. There was a lot of opposition to the use of it in the immigration sector from asylum seeker support groups, who were outraged that a measure they associated with the management of criminals was suddenly being applied to the management of asylum seekers. There is, in fact, no reason you can't use electronic monitoring in a variety of different contexts; nonetheless, it has an association with the management of criminals, and there is a slight symbolic difficulty in taking it out of that context and using it somewhere else.
I have a lot of contact with European countries that do electronic monitoring and I'm firmly of the view that the country to learn from is Sweden. Sweden has been using electronic monitoring since 1996. It was the first fully national scheme in Europe, as opposed to the first pilot scheme, which was in England and Wales. The crucial difference between the way the Swedes do it compared to England and Wales is that they integrated it into their probation service from the outset and they've only ever used electronic monitoring as part of an integrated rehabilitation package.
They use it very specifically as an alternative to a custodial sentence, and I think they're very clear about that. They use it with offenders who could have been given a custodial sentence but were given the option of serving that sentence in the community. These offenders have to have a job and are usually undergoing some kind of rehabilitation program in the community at the time they are subject to electronic monitoring.
This project has been subject to a very impressive evaluation, with a very clear and robust methodology, and they showed they got very good results in using electronic monitoring. Modestly, they admit that they can't say for certain that electronic monitoring is the crucial ingredient that gives them the successful result of reduced recidivism. They are looking into that further, but any thoughtful reader of this research can't help but be encouraged about the potential of electronic monitoring in the context of an integrated program of work.
In fact, this particular use of electronic monitoring in Sweden is not dissimilar from what Canada's James Bonta suggested might be worthwhile. After the research he did in 2000 on a very small sample, he suggested that electronic monitoring might be usable as a way of stabilizing the lives of offenders subject to a rehabilitation program and be sufficient to help them complete the program and get the benefit from it that they wouldn't get if they didn't complete the program.
That was a very small—
