Electronic Monitoring in England and

WalesJames Toon

Head of Electronic MonitoringHome Office

Content of presentation

•Development of electronic monitoring (EM)

•EM technology

•The legal framework

•EM statistics

•Service delivery

6.Costs and effectiveness

1. Development of electronic monitoring

The prison population problem

• How to manage a growing prison population is a common problem in government. In England and Wales the prison population is 75,000 and rising

• Budgetary constraints mean that building more and more prisons cannot be the only solution

• As an alternative to custody, governments need a credible and effective way of dealing with offenders in the community

• This dual approach – prison for those who deserve it, tough community penalties for those who don’t – has been the basis of British criminal justice policy since at least 1988

Electronic Monitoring• The British answer involves the use of electronic

monitoring (EM) technology with offenders

• EM is a form of remote surveillance with several applications:

➡ it monitors compliance with a curfew by monitoring continuously whether an offender is present at a specified place, or absent from it (RF monitoring)

➡ it monitors attendance at programmes by intermittent phone calls at fixed or random intervals (Biometrics)

➡ it tracks an offender’s location as he moves from place to place (Satellite Tracking)

EM milestones – 1• 1989: EM piloted in pre-trial cases in two cities

• 1991: Criminal Justice Act allowed courts to make curfew orders with EM

• 1995: Curfew orders with EM piloted in three probation areas

• 1997: Curfew order pilots extended to a further four probation areas

• 1998: Crime and Disorder Act allowed some kinds of prisoner to be released early and complete their sentence at home under a curfew with EM (the Home Detention Curfew scheme)

EM milestones – 2• January 1999: HDC scheme goes live throughout

England and Wales

• December 1999: Curfew orders with EM made available throughout England and Wales

• 2000: Criminal Justice and Court Services Act allowed EM to be used to monitor any court requirement or licence condition, not just curfews

• 2001: First biometric schemes introduced in three pilot areas

• 2004: Satellite tracking pilots begin in three probation areas

Starting with pilots• England and Wales has several EM programmes. Most

of them started as pilots:

➡ We wanted to test the equipment and procedures on a small scale before national implementation

➡ In some cases, going straight to a national scheme would have been too expensive

• The exception was the HDC scheme which was national from the start – but this followed a positive evaluation of the curfew order with EM programme; and the technology had already proved itself

2. EM technology

RF monitoring• Most EM in England and Wales uses Radio Frequency

transmissions to monitor compliance with a curfew

• The offender wears a non-removable device round the ankle containing a battery-operated radio transmitter

• This sends signals to a monitoring unit in the curfew address with a radio receiver

• The monitoring unit sends the signals down a phone line to a computer in a monitoring centre

• If the offender goes out of range (for example leaving the house) or damages the monitoring equipment, this registers in the control centre and monitoring staff respond immediately

RF equipment

Biometrics• Monitoring people with biometrics involves using their

physical characteristics to identify them. EM in England and Wales uses the voiceprint to do this

• A record of the offender’s voiceprint is taken and stored on computer

• The computer telephones the place where the offender is required to attend a programme. The offender must answer some basic questions

• The computer matches the offender’s voice against the voiceprint record and alerts monitoring staff if there is a negative match

Satellite Tracking• England and Wales has just started using Satellite

Tracking in three pilot areas – mainly to monitor compliance with an exclusion order banning the offender from specified places

• The offender wears a portable tracking device which receives signals from a number of satellites and calculates its location

• Location data is transmitted to a central computer either in real time, using a GSM component in the device, or retrospectively by downloading the data when the device is attached to a telephone

• Monitoring staff know if the offender has entered an exclusion zone and respond appropriately

3. The legal framework

Legal framework: curfew orders with

EM• Maximum length of curfew order is 6 months (3 months

for offenders under 16)

• Curfew length is between 2 and 12 hours a day, on days when curfew operates (doesn’t have to be every day)

• Curfew requirement must not clash with education, employment or religious activity

• All offenders are eligible, unless the sentence is fixed by law (e.g. life sentence for murder)

Legal framework: HDC – 1

• Eligible prisoners released up to 4½ months early, following a risk assessment

• Final part of sentence served at home under a curfew with EM

• Curfew operates every day and must be at least 9 hours (in practice all curfews are for 12 hours overnight)

Legal framework: HDC – 2

• Prisoners serving between 3 months and just under 4 years are eligible for HDC

• Certain categories are excluded:

➡ sex offenders

➡ prisoners awaiting deportation

➡ those who have breached the HDC conditions on a previous occasion

4. EM statistics

Usage of EM • In the period from 28 January 1999 to 30 April 2005,

EM was used in a total of 207,451 cases

• At 30 April 2005, a total of 10,870 cases were currently being monitored

• EM is used at all stages of the criminal justice system. Caseload is 6% pre-trial, 60% court order, and 34% post-release

• This is the largest EM programme in the world outside the USA – and it accounts for almost all the European usage of EM

Distinctive features - 1

CountryPlacements in

2004%

Belgium 1,377 2.1

England & Wales 52,923 81.9

France 2,911 4.5

Netherlands 3,742 5.8

Portugal 332 0.5

Sweden 2,705 4.2

Switzerland 631 1.0

Total 64,621 100.0

The size of the

EM programme

in England and Wales

is out of all proportion

to those elsewhere.

Why?

Growth of EM volumes

Reasons for rise in EM volumes

• Expansion of HDC programme in response to prison overpopulation. Process administrative not legislative

• Introduction of pre-trial and post-release EM schemes for juvenile offenders – also in response to pressure on the custodial estate

• Significant and unexplained rise in court use of curfew orders with EM

Impact of EM on prison population

• Pre-trial: use of bail curfew with EM. Some defendants would have been bailed anyway, but others would have been remanded in custody. Government wants to restrict use to remand cases – legislation planned

• Court order: courts can impose curfew with EM (and other requirements) instead of sending offenders to prison. The issue is how far curfew orders displace custody rather than other disposals

• Post-release: the Home Detention Curfew scheme is a direct replacement for custody and currently saves over 3,000 prison places – the equivalent of 5 new prisons

5. Service delivery

Service delivery – 1

• The entire EM service in England and Wales is delivered by the private sector under contract to the Home Office

• New five-year contracts began in April 2005, covering the whole of England and Wales in five regions

• The new contracts use two suppliers:

➡ Securicor Justice Services Ltd

➡ Premier Monitoring Services Ltd

Map of new contract regions

Service delivery – 2 • The government’s role is to manage the contracts and

monitor supplier performance. This includes:

➡ monthly audit of performance against the stated service levels

➡ payment of supplier invoices (less any deductions for under-performance)

➡ monthly contract review meetings between the government and each supplier

➡ managing the relationship with the supplier

• The Electronic Monitoring Team in the Home Office has 15 civil servants working on all aspects of the EM contracts

Distinctive features - 2

FunctionResponsibility of the

private sector in England and Wales

Supply equipment ✓Operate monitoring centre ✓Install equipment and induct persons on scheme ✓Respond to violations ✓Initiate breach procedures ✓

The involvement

of the private sector

in delivering the EM

service is greater in

England and Wales

than anywhere else.

Why?

Using the private sector• Service delivery by the private sector is most cost-effective in

relatively small areas with a high population density as transport and labour costs are reduced

• In the federal EM contract in the USA, the private sector supplies the equipment but local probation officers deliver the EM service – the USA is too large for the private sector to do that

• Compare the population density of UK and Poland:

➡ UK: 243 persons per square kilometre

➡ Poland: 124 persons per square kilometre

• 60% of the Polish population lives in an urban environment but this accounts for only 6% of the area of Poland

6. Costs and effectiveness

Cost of EM – 1• The Prison Service Annual Report 2003/04 gave the

annual unit cost of a prison place as £39,668. This is for public sector prisons only

• Under the new EM contracts, the annual unit cost of RF monitoring of curfews is estimated at about £5,100 a year – significantly cheaper than prison

• It is also cheaper than other community penalties such as probation and community service

• The relative cost matters more than the absolute cost

Cost of EM – 2• Three main components to the EM cost:

➡ A monthly fixed price, for maintaining the operation

➡ A one-off charge for installing and removing the equipment in each case

➡ A daily monitoring charge in each case

• These reflect the actual cost drivers in providing an EM service

• All charges are volume-dependent – so unit costs fall as volumes rise

Effectiveness of EM

• Compliance with EM programmes is very high (93.0% in April 2005) – this compares favourably with other disposals

• BUT research evidence suggests that EM makes no difference to re-offending rates – which is not unexpected, since a curfew with EM in itself does nothing to address offending behaviour

• In England and Wales the main value of EM lies in its cost-effectiveness compared to imprisonment

Any questions?