Rapists and child sex offenders will face round-the-clock real-time tagging after serving their full prison term

[IwantToRetire]

It comes after Andy Burnham announced rapists and those guilty of child sex and grooming crimes will not be included in the controversial prisoner early release scheme.

This means they will not come out of prison a moment before they were due to. A new £700million package will use new tracking technology to monitor released sex offenders' movements. It means police and probation will be able to act faster if they breach licence conditions.

Full article at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/prison-release-sex-offenders-tagging-37556882

The Telegraph has a new story about this but cant access! Not able to archive All rapists and paedophiles to be tagged for a year after release

All rapists and paedophiles to be tagged for a year after release

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/6510130c9ab11e37

A year? Why not a week or a month? What’s the point of just one year?

As prisoners are always released before they have actually served the word of their sentence, rapists and paedophiles should be tagged and supervised for the rest of their sentence. At least.

I'd suggest an Airtag for at least 10 years. Wouldn't have to be monitored daily, just means their location would always be known in the event of any sex crime.

Letting them out should never be an option

A year?

What's the point then?

"...should be tagged and supervised for the rest of their sentence."

All prisoners are released from prison on licence under probation supervision from when they leave prison until the end of their sentence.

In cases where a prisoner has less than 12 months on licence after their release then the probation supervision is extended to 12 months.

Eg In the past, if a prisoner was sentenced to say 20 months then they would spend 10 months in prison and 10 months on licence, that is 50%. However, since their period on licence was less than 12 months then their period of supervision would be extended.

This was then reduced in 2024 under the Labour government so that if a prisoner was sentenced to 20 months then they would serve 8 months in prison and 12 months on licence, or 40%.

The latest changes mean that, from 1st October, if a prisoner has been sentenced to 20 months then they will spend 6 2/3 months in prison and 13 1/3 months on licence, that is 33%.

This applies to all prisoners except those convicted of violent or sexual crimes who would still have to serve 50% in prison. There are also some prisoners that are required to serve longer than this.

[EDIT]

Although, just thinking about it, I was walking down the street a couple of days ago and noticed a man in his 50s walking towards me (since it was so hot he was wearing shorts).

I could see that he had an ankle tag. That did really surprise me (I turned to have another look after I had walked past him just to make that I wasn't mistaken).

On second thoughts though, if the scheme mentioned hasn't started yet then he definitely wasn't a sex offender as they are specifically excluded from the current Home Detention Curfew that lets offenders out of prison even earlier than early release.

On licence - with a tag. As a PP pointed out, that way it is known where they were when a crime was committed. Or before a crime was committed: if a child reports the same man watching the playground for several days, the paedophile out on licence could get away it, but the tagged paedophile would be known to have started pre-offending behaviour.

Its hard to know whether this is well thought out or just another throw the public a bone suggestion.

If the sentence is about just serving time based on how serious the crime is seen to be, then some sort of mathematical formula is the yardstick.

If the sentence is intended in any way to help the criminal reform, obviously a year is just an empty gesture. And as said upthread, walking round with a tag is I suspect becoming less and less of a social taboo.

How about a luminous tattoo on the forehead?

If they aren't "reformed" then women need to be made aware that this is an unformed sexual predator.

But as other PPs have said at least it means that (in theory) they can be identified as being in a particular area.

I imagine a sort of sci fi future where no one going to prison, depending on you crime you get a certain type of tag, and police officers just sit at computer screens all day monitoring the tags.