UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away The UK Ministry of Justice is considering rolling out biometric technology in prisons to cut down on visitors bringing in contraband, reporting that a "successful" recent trial had a deterrent effect. However, privacy campaigners said news of the trial had come as a "total shock", and watchdogs warned the tech must only be …
"I am a little uncertain how iris scanning is supposed to detect heroin stuffed up a lady's front bottom."
The justification provided by the MoJ is that those engaged in organised and persistent smuggling are often using stolen or fraudulent documentation to get through the front door as a visitor and then repeating that process frequently across many prisons. By actually verifying the presented ID is representing the prisoner and then logging that identity (or their biometrics) centrally, it becomes a lot more difficult to hide in the noise across many prisons or to switch identities and try again.
Amusingly, this is already routine practice in many city centre nightclubs to stop problem drug dealers from getting in.
This very much strikes me as something that, if properly explained and justified, the public would be wholly behind. People in prison, and to a lesser extent those visiting them, should expect to have certain freedoms and rights curtailed. One of those is the right to privacy. Visitors are already subject to search on entry to the prison. Visitors are already required to present their identity documents and have their visit logged. If biometric and identity verification technology could be shown to curtail the rampant contraband problem in our prisons, would people really strenuously object? I don't think so.
Rolling it out in secret, intentionally avoiding all oversight, is another matter entirely.
Sorry mate I'm British. I've never visited a prison but I would expect to be subject to the same kind of identity checks entering a prison as sometthing like jury service (rigorous). No problem with not letting people in prisons without confirmation of identity.
But as someoone said above the methods need to be publc.
This actually seems like a plausible use case for facial scanning, but the voice in the back of my mind is screaming:
1) Why was this not approved in public first of all and run by all the relevant people to keep it public.
2) This is the thin end of the wedge. It's easy to get legislation passed to put these systems into prisons, but our government will make the wording fuzzy enough that it'll fit for a nursery, a cash machine, a pub or a stadium...
Test the system in a number of controlled environments and trials, before you implement it across, against the general public. Oh, by the way, that system of granting and denying certain "favours", like being able to buy tickets for travel, for the misbehaving public, apparently it works pretty well in China. Should be easy to scale down, methinks and Capita would LOVE to demonstrate how it would BRING HUGE SAVINGS to the Budget and GREATLY ENHANCE THE SAFETY of The System.
p.s. the frog might leap out if that water's too hot, sure but hey, make the walls high enough...
That is actually what happens on admission to prison (in Scotland at least). Prisoners have a whole body scan, and anything found is either confiscated or returned to the inmate as appropriate. To facilitate that, each prison has a safe to hold confiscated items (known as the shitty safe for obvious reasons). They are kept in a holding area with special toilets until they hand it over, one way or another.
If you doubt the ability to hide contrabrand about the person, a female prisoner was put in a temporary area to be searched, and afterwards had her clothing removed to be checked, leaving her naked. The room was empty. Five minutes later, officers found her drinking a can of coke and smoking a cigarette.
Biometric trials that fail, facial recog that fails miserably, government IT projects that don't stop failing and, for some unfathomable reason, are never stopped - does anyone else have the impression that, in general and broadly speaking, Benny Hill is in charge and has been for the past decade ?
"If Benny Hill had been in charge it all would have been funny. It's not been funny."
Correction:
If Benny Hill had been in charge ....... it would have been comparatively 100% successful !!!
Come to think of it virtually anything would have been more successfull including a 'House Brick' !!!
Is it possible to get a more useless and inefficient group of 'yahoos' than the current politicians we have.
Case in point .... (Chris Grayling, Karen Bradley, Amber Rudd, all the way to Mrs May herself. That is just a small example of the 'Political excellence' we are lumbered with !!!. BTW don't forget the 'absent without permission' opposition party that is all but not there in spirit and mind !!!)
If Biometric trials are all failing then why is it they can use facial recognition at the airport in the passport control? I used it myself, scan passport then look at camera.
I don't think it is failing, I think that's just a way to justify no oversight till it's too late and it's everywhere.
facial recog that fails miserably
You need to differentiate facial recognition as used by the police to scan crowds, which does seem to have an unacceptable failure rate, from the individual recognition that I assume they're using in prisons. I'd expect that to be about as reliable as the facial recognition on smartphones.
"Ministry of Justice" - with Sheriff Buford T. Justice at the helm.
Actually on a serious note, the Lysenko story is a bit misunderstood.
Western biology at the time was in full-on genetic inflexibility mode. Obviously growing wheat progressively further north wouldn't work, stupid Soviets ha ha!
Since then it has turned out that many organisms have different expressions due to genetic controls that are affected by the early environment. Growing wheat under cold conditions may select for the samples which have a better cold adaptation mechanism. No memory of previous cold environments is needed, just plain old natural selection. Wheat whose adaptation mechanisms fail to turn on and off the right genes don't get to reproduce.
Where it went wrong were Marxist theorists confusing this with dialectic materialism, as silly as the churches trying to apply Christian doctrine to science. But Lysenko himself wasn't being stupid.
Epigenetics isn't quite the same thing. The DNA isn't being altered by the efforts of the parent (or grandparent (see the evidence of grandchildren of famine survivors apparently having genes to better survive famine being active)), it's different parts of the existing genome being activated or deativated by stimuli.
Justice is most definitely not devolved to the Senedd. It should be.
Although we do get lots of English convicts devolved to prisons in Wales. And English citizens in need of social housing get devolved to estates in Wales, hundreds of miles from their homes and friends.
Ho hum, roll on #indywales. Latest polls show major swing to Plaid Cymru from Labour, and fast growing support for Indy. Pretty soon they'll be left with the United Kingdom of Norf and Sarf England.
Justice would be an interesting one to devolve, as in Scotland. Wales has a long (>1000 years) history of rather interesting legal principles, which focus on justice, restitution and recompense rather than punishment and revenge as seen in the Anglo-Norman English legal system.
"Ho hum, roll on #indywales. Latest polls show major swing to Plaid Cymru from Labour, and fast growing support for Indy. Pretty soon they'll be left with the United Kingdom of Norf and Sarf England."
Oi! I'll have you know that The Peoples Liberation Front For The Independence Of The Kingdom Of Northumbria has increased in membership by 1000% this year alone. There's 10 of us now! It's the fastest growing independence movement in the UK!!
"Or, when Scotland devolves, you could always petition to rejoin them on the basis that Scotland ruled large parts of Northumbria at one point."
If we choose the right time period for our historic borders, we get Edinburgh and most of East Lothian as part of Northumbria. Bloody Scots can move their parliament back into their own historic borders :-)
United Kingdom of Norf and Sarf England
Followed by the breakaway of the Danelaw[1] on the basis that they are distinct from "those soft Southern jessies".
(The problem with indywales is that Wales has very little status in law - unlike Scotland[2] and NI. It would take some interesting legal gymnastics to redefine it as a country and not as a series of council areas to the west of England.. But if they can do it, I'm sure that the Cornish[3] wouldn't be far behind)
[1] Yes, I'm aware that, at one point, it nearly extended down to London on an oblique from north-west to south-east.
[2] A formerly-independent country with several walls between them and us.
[3] Kernow bys vikken!
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If you don't become a criminal, you won't be in prison.
Literally true but not everybody in prison now had good mental health, was living a reasonably prosperous & bearable lifestyle with some sort of future and just decided to go on a crime spree for the hell of it or to get rich.
I'm not justifying crime - most poor or mentally unwell people commit very little - but there are demonstrable relationships between levels of poverty, lack of mental health care, crime rates & prison populations.
I agree that prisons (or other punishment such as properly enforced community service cleaning public toilets and the like) shouldn't be a walk in the park - for white collar "non-violent" crooks who defraud people of their pensions just as much as for your sawn-off wielding sub-post-office robber.
But austere shouldn't mean barbaric - Dostoyevsky was right about society's treatment of prisoners as were Ghandi & Churchill about its weakest members in general.
Top priority should be the stamping out of all types of crime inside prisons especially violence. Mental health support & rehabilitation should be central not just a sop to liberals. Otherwise you've got a self-perpetuating and ever more expensive penal system.
It's not much different to speeding; if you don't speed, you won't pay a fine.
Could not agree more about these attempted man-slaughterers - one group that does fit the "for the hell of it" category. Sick to death of them bitching about getting caught, same as those who park on double-yellows, use mobile phones while driving or don't use the indicators if they only see pedestrians about.
The tired old excuse that the limit sign was obsured is a bit thin with satnav and is nonsense if you're on a familiar road but you're entitled to argue it in court if you're sure. If you choose not to argue it then don't try to use it as a justification after the fact.
Don't get me started on APNR though - if they just used it for average speed checks, TWOCking and BOLOs and deleted it immediately afterwards that would be fine. Of course we trust them to do that, don't we? *hollow laugh*
Anyway, morning rant over. Maybe! :-)
We don't make crimninals' lives easy. But if we are putting ourselves in the moral high seat in order to judge them, then we must hold ourselves to high moral and ethical standards, such as consideration, care, fairness, the avoidance of cruelty. Otherwise we are merely brutes with more power than those brutes.
Good to know it's still maintaining it's parents reputation as a designated "Centre for Evil" in the UK.
TBF I can see this might be a bit better than the HO facial recog trials in London. Consider the question.
Is the live image we have of subject X the same as the picture we have of subject X ?
Vs Does this live image of someone match one of the millions we've got stored in our mugshots database (even the ones who've never been convicted of a crime)?
With the available processing power of a cheap laptop being (literally) 1000x greater than an AI workstation of the early 80's you'd think the former question would have a fighting chance of being answered on a near real time basis today.
Still seems a very complex "technology fix" to poorly implemented checking systems.
Be careful with this one. It's another one of those opaquely-funded groups which try to change government policy at 55 Tufton Street.
Their agenda seems to be only jump on government, but the same thing were done by private companies they wouldn't have a problem with it.
It's another one of those opaquely-funded groups which try to change government policy at 55 Tufton Street.
That seems a very limited ambition. Do they intend to extend the scope of government policy changing to the rest of Tufton Street? The whole of the London Borough of Westminster? London itself? Further? I think we should be told...
Plenty of people with no passport or driving licence.
With unwillingness of utility companies, banks etc, to send you paper statements, wanting everything online to save them pennies, it can be non trivial for people without passport and driving licence to get "proof of identity".
As has already been said, prison staff are always a potential weak link as far as smuggling things go.
For more sophisticated smuggling with infiltration of supply chain there's loads of options e.g. hiding it in food goods supplied to the prison and kitchen staff removing the contraband.
And drones of course
The goal posts will always move (impregnating materials in drugs used to be a thing until the authorities caught on, inmate could then just e.g. soak letter they received in some water and wait and voila LSD (or whatever hard to detect drug) solution to quaff ).
"Low level" smuggling will be unaffected by fake ID as if family member / close friend feels enough pressure to smuggle then they will regardless ... and lots of "low level" contraband is from family / friends of inmates
Should have biometrics scanned to access their office. To prevent imposters (see 1/2 of all sci-fi movies).
I wonder how they will like all their data belonging to the same system they persecute people with. And the chuckles when they are mis-identified and arrested will be priceless.
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