Revealed, ankle tags that keep criminals sober
HUNDREDS of drink-drivers and violent thugs in Scotland will be ordered to wear high-tech tags that force them to give up alcohol.
The Scottish Government has announced a £35 million expansion of electronic monitoring as part of its drive to ensure fewer offenders are sent to jail.
For the first time, criminals whose offences involve alcohol will be fitted with so-called ‘ankle breathalysers’ or ‘sobriety tags’.
The gadgets – which have been successfully introduced in the United States and parts of London – are issued by a court as part of a community sentence and trigger an alert if alcohol is detected on the skin.
Worn on the ankle, they take a reading every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, and can pick up even the smallest traces of alcohol emitted in perspiration.
The move is part of Justice Secretary Michael Matheson’s drive to cut the number of inmates in jails, which will include a presumption against sentences of less than a year.
But critics have warned that tagging criminals rather than imprisoning them should not be used as a way of saving money at the expense of public safety. About 1,280 offenders are tagged in Scotland but, if the Management of Offenders Bill is passed when it goes before the Scottish parliament this year, the figure is expected to more than double.
Radio frequency tags – used in Scotland since 2002 as part of a home detention curfew – will still be available to the courts.
However, the Scottish Government is keen to give sheriffs the power to hand out global positioning system (GPS) tags – which track an offender’s exact location and allow for exclusion zones – and also ‘transdermal alcohol monitoring’ tags.
An 18-month pilot scheme in London, where 113 offenders were given sobriety tags, found that 92 per cent stayed sober for up to four months – higher than the compliance rate for traditional community orders.
US-based company SCRAM Systems supplied the tags (pictured) for the London scheme. It said: ‘At a time when alcohol continues to fuel a significant proportion of crime in the United Kingdom, SCRAM Systems offers the only secure alcohol monitoring tag available in Europe.’
With its tags, limits are not put on where and when an offender travels but instead a period of abstinence is enforced.
Wearers must download the data stored by the tag daily and breaches are flagged up. Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Liam Kerr said: ‘There is definitely a place for the tagging of offenders as a form of punishment and rehabilitation, but it’s got to be enforced and properly monitored.
‘This cannot come at the expense of a robust sentencing structure which places public safety at its
‘People will be extremely suspicious’
heart. The SNP wants to scrap jail sentences of less than 12 months. People will be extremely suspicious that this expansion is a way of enabling that.’
The Scottish Government confirmed it hopes to carry out ‘small-scale’ pilot projects of alcohol monitoring and GPS tagging.