Criminal tracking pilot exposes technology flaws

A trial using satellite technology to track convicted offenders has met with mixed results and uncovered potential technology problems that might hamper a larger deployment, according to a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) report.

Piloted in Manchester, Hampshire and the West Midlands between September 2004 and last summer with 336 offenders, the technology could be used either to ensure an offender didn't enter an exclusion zone - and area which courts said they could not enter - or to provide general information about their movements throughout a day.

But active, real-time monitoring was too expensive even for the trials, so the study mostly used passive monitoring, where information was uploaded once or a few times a day. In a few cases, hybrid tracking was used, where offenders were tracked passively unless they entered an exclusion zone, at which point real-time tracking would kick in.

Offenders could be tracked as close as two metres, but tall buildings confused the satellite system, the report said.

A major flaw with the system is less high-tech, however. All offenders needed to do to out-wit the technology is take it off or not recharge it.

"This provides an important reminder of the limitations of satellite tracking, and indeed of community supervision generally, whatever its level of intensity," the report said. "Once unlawfully at large, if an offender does not continue to carry a tracking unit or keep it charged during this time, it will not be possible to monitor the offender electronically and any protection that satellite tracking can provide will be lost."

The 336 offenders in the trial included those convicted of sexual and violent crimes, as well as young offenders. They wore ankle tags and carried a portable tracking unit with GPS.

The system cost £42 a day per offender in monitoring costs, but the research suggested that price would fall if the system were rolled out on a larger scale.

Nearly half of offenders in the trial said the devices helped them stay out of trouble, but 58 per cent were recalled for breaching their release licence or had their community penalty revoked. About a fifth were recalled based entirely on information from the tracking system, with another 26 per cent recalled from a combination of the monitoring and other sources.

Magistrates said they considered electronic monitoring a helpful alternative sentencing option, and field officers said the equipment worked well. But offender managers had mixed feelings, in some cases saying offenders focused on the equipment rather than their own rehabilitation during meetings. But offender managers said the system helped them monitor exclusion zones and gain better information about offenders, and helped remind and deter offenders.

A major flaw in the trial was creating reports. The monitoring companies expected to be able to automate the process, which didn't work for the criminal justice system, leading a senior manager from one of the monitoring companies to say the labour needed to handle the information being generated was untenable.

"I cannot carry on developing [location] reports by 10am every day for every single offender and e-mailing them out and double checking them for accuracy before they go," the manger said. "You couldn't run 2,000 offenders in that way. Well, you could, but the service wouldn't be cost effective. You'd have to have a new building for all the new people ... it's not just the production of [location] reports, it's the queries you've got coming back round the rest of the day, so the workforce would be untenable."

The MoJ has not yet decided if it will go forward with a rollout of the technology, a spokeswoman said.

"The Ministry of Justice is currently considering the evaluation report, and the recommendations of a National Offender Management Service Working Group, on the future use of the satellite tracking of offenders in England and Wales," the spokeswoman said.

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