Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics about Tagging

In England and Wales 67.4% of all prisoners released from prison re-offend within two years - a figure that has stayed stubbornly high for decades.

Under the Home Detention Curfew, prisoners can be released up to four and a half months early, as long as they wear an electronic tag.

Gerry Sutcliffe, who was appointed as Under-Secretary of State for criminal justice and offender management on 5 May 2006 said last week that only 4% of people offended while wearing tags.. in real life this means that since the scheme was introduced 1999 Home Office figures show that more than 1,000 violent crimes, including five killings, have been committed by prisoners released early with electronic tags.

This use of statistics is entirely spurious, dishonest and manifestly nonsense...

1. Offenders released early are specially selected and evaluated for a low risk of offending.
2. The 4% rate relates to and average period of 60 - 90 days whilst being tagged and only for against offences against the person.
3. There are NO FOLLOW UP studies about the rate of re-offending of prisoners who are freed from the tag.

There is one statistic that is precise, determined and brings a smile to the Home Office Ministers - MPs on the Commons Public Accounts Committee said it cost £70 a day less to enforce a curfew than keep people in jail... it also releases another desperately needed prison places.

Tagging is also used in place of prison - Curfew Orders in England and Wales, a Restriction of Liberty Order in Scotland. Of these there is no monitoring of offending whilst tagged or later re-offending - we simply don't know - except that one (out of only 2,500 convicted prisoners) tagged offender in Scotland committed murder.

However , the most detailed information is available about the , costs, and performance of the tagging companies.

The whole concept of tagging is said by Sheila Bird of the Royal Statistical Society to be, " ill designed, and that studies concentrate only on costs of the process and not in it's effectiveness in preventing re-offending"

Former senior probation officer David Fraser advocates that tagging should be abandoned..

"Supervising persistent offenders in the community, with or without a tag, is disastrous for the public," he said.

"The public need to be protected from crime. It is absolutely amazing that [the government] are able, somehow, to ignore this. What must happen? They are sleepwalking into civil unrest, in my view."

The growth in the UK prison population is astonishing, the management of it is increasingly stretched and drug taking, widespread, (50% in many prisons) is tacitly allowed to pacify the population. The concept and practice of rehabilitation and education , is underfunded, understaffed, and impractical. Prisoners are housed further and further from their families destroying family ties.

No wonder the Minister lies about the Statistics....but then he neither understands what prison is to do, nor how statistics should be used with care and accuracy.

67.4% of all prisoners released from prison re-offend within two years in England and Wales - a figure that has stayed stubbornly high for decades.... nothing is being done to address the problem.

Professor Sheila Bird is Principal Statistician at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit and is a specialist in (amongst many other areas) Illegal drugs epidemiology including in prisons; application of scientific method to criminal justice for injecting drug users and in determining cost-effective sentencing.

She chaired the report "Performance indicators: good, bad and ugly" by the Royal Statistical Society which discussed the utility and practice of performance monitoring of public bodies.