This will have to go hand in hand with building more prison capacity so that we have the possibility of escalating the punishments for non compliance.
In general the police, local shopkeepers, residents know who the perpetrators of most petty crime and yet nothing is done about it. Whether it is a lack of will or a lack of capacity i am not sure.
We could be making much better use of tagging. But treating it much more like on the spot fines rather than having to go through a court process. Any evidence could be reviewed by a magistrate or Justice of the Peace and tagging imposed.
In some ways i wonder if this could be taken further and have community moderation judging the evidence. People could log in online to review the evidence. Obviously there would have to be a review process and punishments for abuse of the system but in principle.
Evidence can include CCTV, facial recognition, witness testimony
More than just curfews we could have a ban on meeting other tagged people. Restrictions on where they can go and who they can assiciate with.
Local shops and businesses could have access to an online database and whenever someone tagged enters the shop it brings up their details. Not necessarily to ban them but a way of enforcing the idea that someone could be watching.
Subject to police stop and searches, with the police being acces to a realtime database showing locations.
Alongside this though we would have to tough prison sentences on people who do not comply with their tagging conditions. With the tags being electronic the data to prove violations will be much more easily available and could be processed quickly. Violation of the tagging protocols becomes the crime. Rather than whatever they were originally tagged for.
On top of this anyone convicted of a crime whilst tagged will automatically receive a prison sentence.
As i said at the beginning. We need a large increase in prison capacity so that hard lines can be set and punishments imposed.
One wrinkle in this, is that much of the lower level crime is commited by under 18’s even under 16’s who know that the police and courts have little possibility of punishing them. I’m not sure how things might work for these age groups but maybe people have thoughts. I’m tempted to say that the punishments should run all the way down. Criminal responsibility in the UK is aged 10 so maybe we just apply this rigidly.
