In England and Wales, the practice of probation as a criminal sentence dates back to the 10th century, with Athelstan, an Anglo-Saxon King, enacting laws to allow individuals under the age of 15 to be supervised in the community as an alternative to the death penalty. Athelstan’s intervention has been described as the ‘rudimentary groundwork’ for the concept of a probation system. It was not until 1907 that the Probation of Offenders Act formally introduced the term ‘on probation’ and allowed individuals’ release from prison, following assessment of their circumstances.
The Probation Service (along with the police, courts, and immigration services) uses several types of electronic monitoring to monitor the compliance of people on probation. This monitoring can come in the form of radio frequency (to determine if a person is abiding by a Home Detention Curfew), GPS (for the tracking of movements and locations visited by a person), and alcohol monitoring tags (launched in 2020, these monitor alcohol concentrations in sweat). A person can be ‘dual tagged’ with both an alcohol and radio frequency/GPS tag at the same time.
The implementation of GPS monitoring routines – a facilitator of risk management – will reassure decision-makers, provided that the data accessed via the location monitoring online portal is regularly checked and scrutinised. A person on licence from prison, or post-sentence supervision, will be required to seek permission for overnight stays away from their home address; the use of GPS monitoring technology enables compliance with this condition to quickly be confirmed.
When encountering resistance or hesitation to the use of GPS monitoring in a case, Probation Officers may seek to provide an alternative perspective to a person on probation, in that the use of the tag could exonerate that person if a crime with similarities to their past offending behaviour were to take place in the local area. A person on probation could be encouraged to view the use of trail monitoring as ‘protection’ against untrue and/or malicious allegations from others.
Having been piloted in 1989 after appraisal of the potential of electronic monitoring in England and Wales, efforts to promote electronic monitoring started to receive support from across the political spectrum. Public funds were committed to tagging fifty people in a six-month electronic monitoring pilot. The success of this pilot – which had not required legislation or Parliamentary debate unlike a sentencing pilot – resulted in the inclusion of electronic monitoring policy in the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Section 13(3) of that Act enabled arrangements to be made for electronic monitoring by the Secretary of State, to include contracts being made for monitoring the whereabouts of those subject to such a requirement .
Electronic monitoring had been announced by the Conservative government as part of their ‘punishment in the community’ strategy that intended to alter the perception of the purpose of the Probation Service; nevertheless, for others, electronic monitoring was seen as a key step forward in reducing imprisonment figures, including the use of remand for those who were at that time unconvicted. New electronic monitoring pilots that started in 1996 were superseded by a national electronic monitoring programme, and electronic monitoring was formally launched in 1999. As part of the Labour government’s modernisation agenda, electronic monitoring was a partial solution to overcrowding in custody by enabling early releases (initially 60 days before a person’s conditional release date, but later increased to 90 days and beyond).
It is highlighted that for reasons of public safety, restrictive eligibility criteria were attached to the early release scheme, preventing consideration (in the absence of exceptional circumstances) of those convicted of sexual, violent or terrorism offences as well as foreign national prisoners and those serving sentences for public protection. The purpose of the scheme, referred to in the present day as Home Detention Curfew, allows more effective management of a person’s transition from custody to community while they remain ‘subject to significant restrictions on liberty’.
Between 2004 and 2006, a Probation-led pilot of electronic monitoring, using GPS technology, took place in which selected people on probation (including those with ‘prolific’ offending history and people convicted of sexual offences) were made subject to an ankle tag and a GPS portable tracking unit, linked to use of cellular networks, with a view to monitoring location and compliance with exclusion zones. A 2010 project established by Hertfordshire Police compared the movements of monitored people with reported crimes as an alternative to intrusive police contact. GPS technologies under Integrated Offender Management (IOM) have primarily been funded by police forces or Police and Crime Commissioners.
Elliot Tyler 