Labour is turning Britain into an open-air prison

Back in the early 2000s, a Labour Home Secretary famously promised “prison without bars”. As this Labour government releases thousands of prisoners early, that promise now appears prophetic.

Beyond the failure of successive governments to resource, build and manage a prison system that has the capacity to fight crime, there is now another insult to victims. It has been revealed that some of the prisoners being released early have done so without their ankle tags – electronic monitoring that was a condition of their release on licence.

These can be used to monitor compliance with a curfew – most typically being required to stay at a given address between 7pm and 7am. The farce of not monitoring recently released prisoners is made plain in the words of one former prisoner describing it as “a disaster waiting to happen”.

The fact that prisoners have been released without the necessary tags is just the latest example of Whitehall’s failure to capitalise on a technology to enhance public safety. The last twenty years have seen overhyped promises of “prisons without bars” under New Labour, to botched procurements under the Coalition government and of course the serious scandal in which outsourced suppliers had been defrauding the taxpayer for years.

All the while, other countries have been making more effective and creative use of the technology to improve public safety.

With the exception of those police forces who took an early opportunity to use GPS tags on prolific criminals, the opportunity to innovate and apply the technology, or use it in real-time has largely been crowded out by an overbearing and inflexible approach from central government.

Civil servants are keen to keep a tight grip on tagging – even if they struggle, as we have seen this week, to get them fitted in good time – because the over-riding objective in Whitehall isn’t to use tags to fight crime or improve public safety – it’s to help keep the prison population down.

Unsurprisingly then, even those offenders who get tagged don’t have their movements routinely and proactively screened against recorded crime. The last thing the Ministry of Justice or HM Treasury want, is to catch a recidivist that might need locking up again.

As it stands police forces are struggling to keep on top of responding to simple breaches of electronically monitored curfews. Perhaps some have concluded there’s little point in prioritising them if there aren’t the prison places to recall them to?

While Labour, for a while at least, can reasonably lay much of the blame on previous governments, they will soon realise that they are now responsible for delivering on the first duty of government. The crimes committed by those released early will be on their watch, with the political consequences ultimately coming back on them.

As usual, the human consequences will be disproportionately felt by those without gold-plated pensions or expense accounts. The poorest and most left-behind will, as always, suffer the most from another government unprepared to grip crime and disorder.

It will also serve as another stark reminder of how far our political elites have distanced and disconnected themselves from the plight of ordinary people. The aftermath of the riots showed that the government can get a grip of crime and disorder – but there’s an overwhelming sense that some laws and some groups matter more than others to the new regime. For one thing, compare the Left’s reverence for international law with the lax approach taken to both securing our borders and addressing the prison crisis.

Meanwhile, parts of our towns and cities increasingly look, feel and smell like dilapidated holding pens for a homegrown – and imported – mix of crime and disorder. Total reform is required of the Labour party. If they do anything less, it won’t be criminals feeling like they are in prison – it will be you and me, the ordinary law-abiding residents of Britain.