Using Polygraphy to Understand and Manage The Risk to Children Posed By Men Involved in Downloading Indecent Images of Children

About 50% of men who download indecent images of children also commit contact offenses . However few of those arrested for the offense of downloading indecent images will admit more than the police can prove. This leads to the police conducting lengthy forensic examinations of the arrestee’s computers and other digital media. This rarely produces any evidence of contact offending. Therefore the police and the courts are rarely able to distinguish those who pose a danger to the children that they meet from those who do not.

The sentencing guidelines for possession or making indecent images are such that the majority of those found guilty of possessing even very large quantities of the most serious material receive a sentence of a year or less.

Short sentences of less than a year lead to a time served of 26 weeks  which is too short a time for the offender to participate in any meaningful programme that delivers behavior change. Internet sex offending courses which last for 35 weeks and which are not available in prisons reach a small proportion of the UK’s 50,000 suspected internet sex offenders . In 2012, 354 men completed the community based Internet sex offenders treatment programme which is run by probation trusts . Low intensity sex offending courses which are available in prison to those serving sufficiently long sentences are not allocated to offenders whose only offense is downloading or possessing indecent images.

The natural reluctance of offenders to talk to the police while under investigation and the relatively restricted offering of sex offender treatment programmes for internet offenders means that many dangerous men are never confronted about the most harmful aspects of their past offending and therefore little can be done to anticipate future offending.

Polygraphy breaks this cycle. For reasons not fully understood people, even with secrets to keep, will take polygraph tests, as volunteers. Trials with internet sex offenders, on bail and awaiting forensic examination of their computers who had  previously been considered on all the available evidence to be low , even very low risk, have lead to many to make significant disclosures about past very serious offending (previously unknown to anybody).  Polygraphy enable police and MAPPA teams to set risk levels for offenders at safer levels, leads to the protection and rescue of previously unknown victims and keeps communities safe.

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GPS Tagging and the need to pilot a change to the Criminal Justice Act

Introduction

Currently people subject to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) contract get tagged in one of three ways; on bail, on home detention curfew and as a community punishment. In Hansard; Written Answers for 14^th January and 16^th January 2013 the following information is supplied.
Between May 2010 and December 2012 , 281,000 new tagging starts took place of which 78,000 were bail cases, 41,000 were Home Detention Curfew cases and 162,000 were community penalties, proving monthly new start averages of 2,500 (bail), 1300 (HDC) and 5225( Community Penalty)
On average during the years 2005 – 2011 offenders wore a tag for between 70 and 74 days; meaning that at any time between 21000 and 23000 people are tagged. Their tags  simply monitor compliance  with a curfew. It cannot indicate what they were doing or where they were outside of their curfew address.  Few tagged offenders are prolific or serious criminals. The non-tagging of these important offenders represents a missed opportunity.  The strictures of the legislation nominating a single monitoring agent as EM supplier combined with a flawed MOJ methodology (as far as preventing crime is concerned) hinders courts from imposing on prolific offenders a requirement to be subject to meaningful GPS monitoring.
What is required to enable police forces to prove that using electronic monitoring offers an opportunity to prevent and detect crime and to keep communities safe is a temporary and limited relaxation of the law that gives to  Capita alone the status of responsible officer for tagging purposes  If local integrated offender management teams were given the responsibility for monitoring prolific offenders, using up to date crime maps as a reference point for tag wearers’ movements a significant amount of crime would be prevented.

Why Serious and Prolific Offenders are rarely tagged at present.
The tagging of offenders is currently almost exclusively in the domain of the MoJ, who use it to enforce court orders, provide suitable penalties for convicted offenders and manage prison populations. These aims, although wholly unobjectionable are not the same as those of the Police and the Home Office, who want to cut crime and manage operational risk.

The MoJ tagging regime, and the legislation that enables it, selects candidates for tagging carefully and in such a way that most prolific offenders are outside its reach. An offender can only be tagged if on bail, sentenced to a non custodial penalty or released early by a prison. Prolific offenders, who commit house burglary, or street robbery, the sort of people that the police want to monitor and manage, usually do not get bail, do not get sentenced to a community punishment and often are not allowed home early by prison governors on a HDC because of their likelihood of reoffending.

The Opportunity
Relatively small numbers of offenders commit a very high proportion of recorded crime. Across the whole country about 5,000 individuals are responsible for 10% of all crime (whom we might call chronic offenders) and 100,000 offenders (whom we might call repeat offenders) are responsible for 50% of all crime . These two cohorts of offenders use up large amounts of police investigative resources; prison and probation management time and court lists are filled with their cases.  Together they constitute the majority of offenders whom we currently call prolific offenders.  This is the group of offenders rarely tagged under the current regime that GPS Electronic Monitoring could and should impact.

What Offenders Think and Do
Two prominent findings from criminological research are that punishment certainty is far more consistently found to deter crime than punishment severity , and furthermore the speed at which the punishment is meted out also contributes to its deterrent effect .

For prolific offenders punishment is currently insufficiently certain and too slow to deter them.   They reoffend repeatedly. Of those in prison in 2012 on short sentences of six months or under, 50% had 15 or more previous convictions, 26% had more than seven and only 5% had no previous convictions at all . It is clear that for a substantial number of offenders the current regime of punishment and imprisonment are of little or no deterrent effect.  Furthermore punishment only follows on from getting caught and even prolific offenders do not get caught that often. We know from the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction Survey (SPCR)   that prolific offenders commit many offences for which they are never caught. Those surveyed were asked about their offending in the year leading up to their eventual imprisonment. Those who admitted any offences at all (65% of the 1421 surveyed) reported that in the four weeks prior to being arrested for the offence for which they had been imprisoned, and not including that offence, they had committed on average 44 offences for which they had not been caught. This figure was skewed by a small number of incredibly prolific offenders but removing them still left a figure of 20 offences per offender.

Yet the heartening thing about offenders even as prolific and recidivist as these is that they do want to stop. When asked in the survey 97% said that they wanted to give up offending.

Using GPS Tags to Manage Offenders
GPS tags can help offenders in their aspiration by supplying them with a significant external motivator. Knowing that they will get caught almost instantly for any offence they commit that can be linked to a location (burglary, car theft, robbery, assault) acts as a significant deterrent to them both in resisting their own impulses and being able to resist the encouragement of their criminal associates.
In one fell swoop offenders by being required to wear a GPS tag can be supplied with what research has shown is most likely to deter them from reoffending (certainty and speed of detection) and in doing so we can harness their self confessed desire to desist.

GPS tags provide offenders with assistance and also help the general population. Should their wearers reoffend, spree offending (twenty offences in four weeks as described in SPCR) can also be prevented. Offenders wearing a GPS tag may commit crime but they can only do so briefly before getting caught. This prevents further additional harm to communities and reduces wider victimisation.
Being caught through GPS location technology for committing substantial crimes ensures that offenders are actually dealt with for the offences they have committed rather than “mere” failures of compliance. Courts in the knowledge that an offender has not committed a crime (because the GPS data say that he has not) could be freed up from hearing cases of licence condition breaches which could be better dealt with by their probation officers.

How to Deploy GPS tags
Even though the new MoJ contract expects there to be an expansion in the use of GPS tags there is little room in the current regime for getting more prolific offenders to wear them. Burglars and street robbers will still not get bail, will not receive a community penalty and may not be released early by prison governors even with a GPS tag. Even if they did the current contractual data monitoring arrangements do not allow for the comparison of tag wearers’ movements with police crime maps; which is essential if  GPS tagging is to be effective.

However outside the MoJ contract Police Forces, Police and Crime Commissioners and the Mayor’s Office on Policing and Crime are beginning to be alive to the fact that,   there is a real possibility of getting much better oversight and control of the sort of offenders that commit so much damage in their communities. In Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and in a number of Boroughs in London a number of offender management projects invite prolific offenders as volunteers to change their lives and in the course of doing so to wear a GPS tag.  These programmes are delivering crime reduction and crime detection results that are leading to steady expansion into other Police Areas.

New Laws New Opportunities
These pilot programmes have so far involved volunteer offenders; men and women who want to desist from crime. Forces would like to expand into compulsory programmes but   until very recently finding a legal way of compelling offenders to wear a GPS tag has been difficult.  However the new Anti Social Behaviour Act (enacted 20th October 2014) offers the Police opportunities to apply for a criminal behaviour order (CBO) against a convicted offender which can be in place for as long as five years and which can be in addition to a prison or any other sentence. This could also include tagging. The same legislation will also enable them to ask for tagging orders for shorter periods against people who have not even been charged or convicted when in early 2015 Anti Social Behaviour Injunctions (ASBI) are introduced. These offer the same opportunity for courts to compel offenders to take part in monitored programmes.

This legislation offers the opportunity for a paradigm shift in the deployment of GPS  tags against  prolific offenders because through it they will be available against a much wider range of people ( and for longer) than the current MoJ tagging legislation allows for.

However applying for a CBO or an ASBI puts additional expense on the Police (and the local authority who can also apply for an ASBI) because they have to pay to apply and bear their costs of any hearing that determines the application.

The imposition of an EM requirement on its own or as part of a package of measures included in a community sentence   could include the requirement to wear a GPS tag. However the current MoJ contract cannot deliver effectively against such a requirement; The Responsible Officer (Capita) and their  nominated monitoring agent (Astrium)   have nothing to contribute to the meaningful monitoring of GPS data. This requires as a minimum reasonably fast time comparison with police records of crime and incidents.  Only the police can and should do this and it is only this comparison that renders GPS tags effective.

So the Barnet, Hackney, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and other GPS tagging programmes would be significantly enhanced operationally if there was a small alteration to the law (cited at foot note 2) which allowed courts to make an EM requirement under sec 177 – 215 Criminal Justice Act 2003 nominating the Police or some other partner from the local IOM team as the responsible officer. This would only apply in cases where the IOM team actually sought to be the monitoring officer. In all other cases where EM is required the current arrangements would remain in place.But for those prolific offenders known to IOM teams, where GPS tracking offers rehabilitation and desistance opportunities , they could make the application to be the monitoring agent , thereby giving efficacy to GPS technology. This has the potential to significantly reduce crime.