Call for tracking of all sex offenders

Sex offenders released into the community should be monitored using GPS satellite tracking, according to a leading academic.

Mike Nellis, Professor of Criminal and Community Justice at the Glasgow School of Social Work at Strathclyde University, called on the Scottish Government to look at bringing in the technology, which is already used in the United States and has been piloted in Manchester, Birmingham and Hampshire.

Satellite tracking could be allied to more therapeutic measures to provide a deterrent and increase the confidence of the public in the system, he claimed.

Currently, police and local authority social services departments work together under the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements and some offenders are electronically tagged, which alerts the relevant authorities if they stray out of their designated area.

In a letter to The Herald, Mr Nellis argues that while GPS tracking does not help rehabilitate offenders, it imposes “a level of constraint on offenders that police and social work cannot otherwise achieve … it can be experienced by those subjected to it as relatively unintrusive in their daily lives.”

He conceded that the measure might be seen as Orwellian, but said it had been backed by organisations such as the Howard League and the children’s charity Barnardo’s. “If it makes children safer, we shouldn’t see this as like something from 1984,” he said.

Mr Nellis was speaking after it was revealed last week that Fife Council is to work with community justice charity Sacro to pilot Circles of Support and Accountability – an initiative aimed at cutting the risk of sex offenders re-offending, which involves groups of volunteers providing friendship and unofficial monitoring for an offender in their community.

He said GPS tracking could complement this more humanising, rehabilitative approach, and trials of the technology in England had shown promising results. Legislation allowing satellite tracking in England and Wales was introduced in 2000, after the murder of an eight-year-old girl by a known paedophile.

A more recent trial, still ongoing, was launched in September in South London to provide more security for offenders with mental disorders while in medium secure hospital settings. This monitoring was introduced after a patient escaped from hospital and murdered a 73-year-old man.

Mr Nellis said that while Scotland’s existing multi-agency public protection arrangements for sex offenders provide for monitoring of their movements and activities, they are dependent upon manpower and can never be 100% reliable.

While GPS tracking has been rejected in Britain by the Home Office, and was considered by Scotland’s MacLean committee when it examined violent and sexual offences a decade ago, it has become cheaper and more convenient since then, he said.

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said satellite tracking remained under review, but warned that it was costly compared with other options.