£60m, five years late... Tag criminal tagging as a 'catastrophic waste' of taxpayers' cash The UK's Ministry of Justice's system of monitoring criminals with electronic tags has been blasted as a "catastrophic waste of public money" in a damning report by MPs.. The scheme was due to be completed in 2013 but is now running five years late at a cost of £60m to the taxpayer with further delays expected. It has incurred …
The evidence to support a wholesale transformation of the tagging system was weak at best but the Ministry pushed ahead anyway.
Presumably they were conned by a persuasive and fast taking encyclopedia salesman.
Next time, go fetch mummy, not her credit card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9n11xtjZ3Y
All winced out.
Quote from the NYT today -
"Elsewhere shares in Capita, a firm strikingly similar to Carillion, have lost two-thirds of their value since 2015."
In a very interesting commentary on the UK's obsession with outsourcing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/opinion/carillion-privatization-outsourcing-britain.html
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So Gold, Bronze & Silver in the large project f**kup* awards then.
This also looks like earning points on the "Look, see, we tried to work with these SME's, like the Cabinet Office said, but they are just don't get it. Now if someone like Carilion had been available, because they really understand us" agenda.
*Silver for their Stirling display of work at the Olympics.
Stirling
Objection yer Honour! Stirling engines are pretty efficient and that's the one thing the companies mentioned are manifestly not.
Except in the misappropriation of monies from the public purse that is. They could teach[1] PhD-level courses in that..
[1] Of course, teaching also not in their core competencies. Nor in their peripherial competencies. Or, in fact, within the same postcode, county or country as any of their competencies.
The only lesson that has been learned is that government wanks are ab-so-lutely incapable of defining an IT project, let alone managing one.
IME the difference between private and public sector is that the private sector has better meeting biscuits and better cover-ups of failures
The only lessons that should be learnt are that the current civil servants managing these contracts are totally incompetent and only project managers with proven track records should be allowed to run them in future.
This dead wood would have been removed years ago in any private industry that valued accountability.
It's about £30k in operating costs a year to lock somebody up, and one of our newest prisons (HMP Berwyn) is reported as costing £250m for 2,000 places, so over £12k capex per crim.
I doubt that locking the bastards up would be cheaper. And since crims put little value on their own liberty, it's an ineffective punishment. The liberals need to understand that, and work at the mindset of these people. How about a trial of employing official thugs to go round and trash all the person possessions of (say) people convicted of assault? And maybe give them a kicking whilst they're their. That could be a day release job for existing prisoners, to go and turn somebody's home over and shit in the bed.
"I doubt that locking the bastards up would be cheaper. And since crims put little value on their own liberty, it's an ineffective punishment."
Do you have any evidence for that central assumption of value on liberty?
Looking at court reports in my local paper it seems that yet another suspended sentence has been handed out to someone who's already had several "chances", such as tagging, in previous cases. And yet another set of offences committed while on remand awaiting trial.
AFAICS this adds up to training offenders to expect no real curtailment of liberty, no effective deterrence. By the time they get a custodial sentence they've been thoroughly trained in recidivism. I wonder if a change of direction would be more effective: rapid escalation to a short sentence of imprisonment, maybe only a few days. Would it lead to a situation where there were fewer long term prisoners because they'd been deterred early on?
"I doubt that locking the bastards up would be cheaper. And since crims put little value on their own liberty, it's an ineffective punishment." Do you have any evidence for that central assumption of value on liberty?
Go look up HM Gov data on re-offending rates. Those released from custodial sentences have higher re-offending rates (49.2% reoffend within 12 months) than for non-custodial sentences (33.9%). Note that is only "officially detected and proven within twelve months", so actual re-offending rates from most normal people's point of view would be higher.
So whilst your logic of "soft justice begets reoffending" sounds credible, the raw data doesn't support it. Faced with the appalling re-offending rates, we have to accept that prison is largely about crime prevention through detention, not reform. Even in countries with very extensive reform efforts (eg Sweden) they don't see that much better reoffending rates, by the way.
Building more prisons would work for two reasons - 1) you can put more crims behind bars and thus keep them off the streets, and 2) you can extend sentences which works because re-offending rates are lower the longer the sentence served. But we then end up paying more and more to keep criminal idiots off the street.
Go look up HM Gov data on re-offending rates. Those released from custodial sentences have higher re-offending rates (49.2% reoffend within 12 months) than for non-custodial sentences (33.9%).
Hypothesis:
Stupid criminals get caught doing things (e.g., mugging) that earn them custodial sentences rather than non-custodial sentences. Because they're stupid, they get caught most of the time they re-offend. The brighter ones get caught less often.
Just a thought.
"Go look up HM Gov data on re-offending rates. Those released from custodial sentences have higher re-offending rates (49.2% reoffend within 12 months) than for non-custodial sentences (33.9%). Note that is only "officially detected and proven within twelve months", so actual re-offending rates from most normal people's point of view would be higher."
It's not quite as simple as that. The ones who get custodial sentences have, in general, committed more serious crimes or are repeat offenders and more likely to re-offend than those given non-custodial sentences. And that's not cut'n'dried either.
@ AC: It's about £30k in operating costs a year to lock somebody up, and one of our newest prisons (HMP Berwyn) is reported as costing £250m for 2,000 places, so over £12k capex per crim.
I'm not querying your figures (or anyone else's) but I'm not sure that we should look at this purely in terms of how much "enforcing the law" and "justice" costs. If we look at the whole thing purely in "cost" terms it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that a whole section of the criminal law should be torn up; think of what could be saved; no need for the police to investigate anything; no need to find an offender, charge them and put them before a court (think of the savings there!) and thus no need to either fit a tag or incarcerate them because at the stroke of a pen what they had done to get there is no longer against the law.
Decriminalise burglary? Fine! Decriminalise car theft? Fine. Identify an offence and delete it from the law books. Think of all the savings the taxpayer will make.
Of course that approach is reductio ad absurdum but I would hope that it illustrates the point that having a criminal justice system that costs a fortune to operate up to and including the point where what is already a minority of offenders are brought to court and found guilty, only then to scratch around to find ways of not spending any money on effective deterrent and punishment is utterly pointless.
In this case we (as taxpayers) have shelled out handsomely for a system that has failed, with no end to the continuing failure in sight.
I'm not sure that we should look at this purely in terms of how much "enforcing the law" and "justice" costs.
I wasn't (he says, decloaking like a Klingon battle battle cruiser). As you say, we are locked in a cycle of excessive cost and no good outcome. But one major win would be decriminalising most drugs. Take out the drug baron profits that make drugs costly and drive drug users to crime, and that's a huge volume of "funding crimes" that are eliminated. That would also eliminate the minor drug distributor crime which is a disproportionate number of UK prisoners. Also, whilst the drugs barons would move on to other forms of crime, we'd probably have fewer violent turf wars and gun crime. We could require users to be registered, and their use monitored by their GP, allowing healthcare interventions; Quality of drugs could be monitored, reducing some of the load on health services from bad shit. If the regular drugs were readily available legally and cheaply, then there would also be far less of a market for the designer synthetics that are something of a problem (eg spice zombies).
Obviously the drug abusers would go on to kill themselves, but that happens already. And we permit it with alcohol, fags, so why persecute the druggies? And freed of the significant costs of a failing war on drugs, the police could attend to focusing on organised crime, or the resources put into the threadbare social care pot.
As someone who spent 13 years in drugs related law enforcement, I eventually came to the same conclusion - we are never going to control this stuff so the only sane option is to legalise it, control it in a socially acceptable way and tax it just like we do with other drugs e.g. nicotine and alcohol.
I'm no expert on the medical side of things, but from what I understand it's the crap the raw drugs are cut with that causes much of the harm / deaths rather than the drug itself. Regulated supply would take that out of the equation plus raise a pretty penny for the treasury. And yes, much other 'low level' crime (I don't consider someone breaking into my house low level, especially not if my family is inside) is committed to fund a drugs habit so reducing this would be of huge benefit to all.
My only concern would be that legalising highly addictive drugs (e.g. cocaine) would lead people to try it once who would not have otherwise, only to find themselves hooked. There would need to be a barrier to entry of some kind, but not enough to make illegal supply viable. The answer to that one is almost certainly way beyond the mental capacities of govt. policy makers so I guess we go on chucking good money after bad....
There is a growing debate in America which is favoring the decriminalizing of drugs. The classic line is that if you cannot control drugs in a maximum secure prison, where everything is vetted and monitored, what hope do you have in an open society?
The war on drugs is lost.
Best spend the money currently spent on combating the drug trade to help those people who genuinely want to get themselves of drugs.
Another useless fact, it was reported that drinking during prohibition in America was higher than before or afterwards.
But don't you feel that the criminal has been punished?
Because AFAIK that's the core idea of the British system.
BTW IIRC the UK has both the highest proportion of its population (per 1000 head of population) and the highest repeat offending rates in Europe.
But no one likes a "Bad guy" and everyone loves governments "getting tough" on crime.
With a place at prison costing more than a place at a University (not even a good university) you could (literally) pay each repeat offender £20k/pa to not commit another crime*
Like farming "Set aside" for crims, not famers, which HMG seems to have no trouble doing.
As usual I will context this figure with UK national Debt interest Payments: (ndips)
60m?
sod all - half a DAYs ndip
source: https://fullfact.org/economy/interest-payments-national-debt/
That's as maybe - does it excuse the waste 60 charities could have made an impact with that (provided they didn't decide an expensive carpet for their HQ was a better investment). Instead, it was snorted up one nostril for an ego trip and frittered away
The Audit Office discover (on a weekly basis) that vast sums of public money have been 'wasted'.
What happens?
"Lessons are learned" (not)
How about some sackings, loss of pension, claims for negligence, or even imprisonment - for responsible civil servants and politicians. If they stole £9million and gave it to their chums they would be in deep doo-doo, as it is they probably get promoted and a knighthood.
It seems that after every major government initiative the National Audit Office comes along and discovers it was a total shambles, incompetently managed and a waste of money.
Surely a lot of taxpayers money could be saved by abolishing the NAO. We could preprint the announcement of total failure as soon as any project is announced and the message could be published once the project is finally delivered or abandoned?
Locking people up who aren't a risk to the public is a waste of time and money, especially on short sentences. They aren't in prison long enough for it to be a major deterrent or for them to get any skills to enable them to get a job on release, and will often pick up other tips from criminals on how not to get caught next time.
Electronic tagging and curfews could work for a lot of these offenders, but why they decide to do their own bespoke version rather than buy an existing 'off the shelf' system is beyond me.
Once again a project which was intended to save money has actually cost more than it was supposed to save and given us nothing better than we already had.
"It will save money" appears to be the magical incantation for anyone seeking to take the government for a ride.
We will all likely get conned at some time in our lives, but governments seem to get continually scammed and usually by the same people. Lessons are never actually leaned, the same mistakes are repeated time after time, and then the NAO inevitably pops-up to say, "yup; you've been had again".
Aren't the miscreants already being tagged?
Or are criminals the only one's that aren't carrying a tagging device?
Even if they tried to disable the GPS tracking in settings doesn't it still send location data back to the wardens?
Not really understanding the enormous price tag unless the criminals are using a tagging device with face unlock.
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