The UK’s Justice Secretary has admitted he does not know how many of the roughly 700 prisoners released early this week are being monitored with electronic tags, in a television interview that will deepen concerns about the government’s controversial prison release scheme.
Alex Norris, the Justice Secretary, was pressed by presenter Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday over how many of the inmates who walked free on Thursday had been fitted with tags. He conceded he could not give a figure, saying only that “for the first time there is a presumption on tagging” for those granted early release.
“Day four is too early for me for the numbers,” Mr Norris said.
The admission lands just days after a damning inspection report found serious delays in fitting electronic monitoring tags, with some offenders left unmonitored for up to five months. Inspectors found that only just over half of GPS and radio-frequency tags were fitted on time, while around 60 per cent of alcohol monitoring tags were attached promptly. In only 46 per cent of cases were major licence violations raised and explored by staff, the report said.
Victims’ fears and promised safeguards
The findings have fuelled fears among victims that the system cannot cope with the scale of the early releases. Donna Thompson, whose son Shane was stabbed to death by a robber who had left jail just two weeks earlier, told The Sun the authorities were “letting people out too early with not the right resources”, adding that released offenders faced “no drug rehabilitation” and that “probation isn’t knocking on the door for surprise visits”.
Mr Norris insisted safeguards were in place, saying that “if those individuals do breach their licence they are going back to prison”. He acknowledged the government “would like to have gone further” on domestic abuse protections, but argued the alternative would have been no available prison places at all, meaning perpetrators would have been bailed back to their homes instead.
The Ministry of Justice has described the supervision regime as the “toughest supervision in British history”. Under the new rules, released offenders are banned from entering pubs, clubs and public events as part of what officials call the biggest-ever expansion of electronic monitoring. The inmates freed on Thursday are the first of 4,500 prisoners expected to be released over the next year to tackle severe overcrowding in prisons across England and Wales.
It was reported last month that most of the prisoners being freed under the scheme would not be fitted with monitoring tags, a claim ministers have disputed while struggling to provide concrete figures. For now, the Justice Secretary’s inability to answer a basic question about the programme’s most visible safeguard is likely to intensify political pressure on Labour’s handling of prison overcrowding.
Source: The Sun