IF you saw someone in the street wearing an ankle tag, you would probably think them a bit of a thug.
So give a pay rise to whoever convinced Britain’s most senior legal minister – Justice Secretary Alex Chalk – to wear one for a story in The Sun.
For 24 hours, the pair of us would test what it was like to be clamped with one of these devices usually reserved for criminals.
In essence, we would be criminals for the day.
Why? Because they are being used on a scale like never before – up by 55 per cent in the last year alone.
And that is partly because Britain’s prisons are bursting at the bars.
The country’s jails are so squeezed for space that experts fear we are “close to breaking point”.
An idea to reduce the burden is to let out the convicts who do not pose much of a threat to free up space for the more dangerous ones who truly need locking up.
By using GPS ankle tags, the theory is that the authorities can still keep an eye on them.
And so – to put them through their paces – on a chilly January afternoon I found myself sitting next to the top Cabinet Minister, with both of our left trouser legs rolled up, shoes off, and banging our feet on the floor.
“We get people to tap their foot a few times first to make sure it’s not fake,” the official fitting the tag told us.
Having confirmed our legs were made of flesh and not wood, he set about fastening the tags just above the ankle.
The LED light flashed a few times and, after checking his laptop, the official gave the thumbs up – the device was armed and we were officially on the grid.
How do the tags work?
First rolled out in 2018, GPS tags send a live location of their whereabouts to boffins at the Ministry of Justice’s Electronic Monitoring Service.
The device is about the size of an old Nokia brick phone, and is fixed to people’s left legs with a thick rubber strap.
They cost the government about £300 each to buy, and as of September 2023 just shy of 9,000 people have been fitted with one.
Mr Chalk described them to me as a “total gamechanger” and a huge improvement to the “radio frequency” tags used when he first started prosecuting as a lawyer.
While those old tags could monitor when convicts left their house, their GPS superiors can track them in real time.
It means the authorities get alerted to any “exclusion zone” breaches – places the criminal is banned from visiting.
“We talk metaphorically about stepping a pace out of line and you’ll be in trouble,” Mr Chalk said.
“This literally gives effect to that. If you step a metre over a certain line, then you risk being breached, because the evidence doesn’t lie.
“And you and you can be back in court potentially and it’s the clang of the prison gates. So I think it’s very sobering.”
What is it like to wear one?
After being fitted with our tags, the official presented Mr Chalk and I with a meaty handbook – Tagging: Everything You Need To Know About Being Tagged.
It explained the dos and don’t of a life clamped up.
Do keep your tag charged.
Don’t tamper with your tag.
Do continue to exercise, but don’t play contact sports.
It’s an ever present reminder of your crime, and the debt you owe to society
Alex Chalk
It even had a section on how the criminal will “benefit” – namely “giving you a reason to stay out of trouble”.
For a small device, it was heavier to wear than I had expected. Not painful by any means, but I could feel it gently bouncing as I walked.
I felt it especially as I lay in bed that night (as did my long-suffering girlfriend who was kicked by it a few times in the night).
If I had been wearing the tag for more than a day, I suspect charging it would have been the biggest nuisance.
The battery lasts for 24 hours, and letting it run out is a serious breach of the tagging conditions.
The options are either charging it quickly by plugging it into the mains – meaning getting comfortable in a potentially awkward spot for a while.
Or by using a slower portable charger that latches onto the tag but appeared to make life just as impractical.
How does it feel to wear one?
But the strangest sensation was not physical – it was emotional.
Wearing the tag, I actually FELT like a criminal.
Despite having done nothing wrong, I bizarrely found myself taking steps to hide it.
Circulating a Westminster reception at a swanky members’ club that night, I was so acutely aware of people catching a glance I couldn’t concentrate on chats I was having.
And when I saw a Tube passenger staring at it aghast on the ride home, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
What must she think? In a suit and tie, I didn’t exactly look like your average thug – which might not be a good thing.
I kept my head down, resisting the fleeting temptation to give her a slow, psychopathic smile just to see the reaction.
The next morning in the TalkTV studios I showed it to presenter Jeremy Kyle, and joked with a straight face that I’d got into a New Year’s Eve street fight.
His look of shock was something to behold – and it was because of the ankle tag, the cold-hard marker of a criminal.
Wearing the tag, I actually FELT like a criminal. Despite having done nothing wrong, I bizarrely found myself taking steps to hide it
Sun man Jack
It’s weird how a lump of plastic can invoke such a response not just from others, but also my own sense of embarrassment.
“It’s an ever present reminder of your crime, and the debt you owe to society,” Mr Chalk said.
Although in the Minister’s case, that ever present reminder manifested in him cycling home that night “like the clappers”, conscious that his team would be able to see his speed…
Are they accurate?
When Mr Chalk and I met 24 hours later to crunch the data with the experts, the results were pretty impressive.
A series of maps had tracked my exact movements with inches.
It showed me leaving the Minister’s office in Parliament and walking straight to one of Westminster’s finest boozers for a lunchtime pint.
For journalistic reasons, of course, as the area surrounding The Clarence pub was my designated exclusion zone.
As soon as I was close enough to start thinking about my first sip of Guinness, an alert at tagging HQ was triggered that I had entered the no-go-area.
The officials told me that – had I been of any real danger – I would have shortly been surrounded by cops.
Two more alerts were triggered. The first for apparently “tampering” with my tag at home. What I thought was harmless fiddling with it turned out to be grounds for a knock on the door by the police.
And the second when I hacked off the tag in the TalkTV green room with a pair of scissors. Obviously, grounds for a police swarm.
A game-changer?
So are these GPS tags really a silver bullet? Mr Chalk certainly thinks the data backs that up.
“If you follow the evidence, those who serve a short custodial sentence are around 58 per cent likely to reoffend in 12 months after.
“If they’ve served their sentence in the community – therefore on a tag – it’s about 22 per cent.
“And the reason for that is that what the court wants to do – which is punish an offender, restrict their liberty, rehabilitate, and potentially operate a curfew – can be achieved very effectively with technology.
“Because these tags will keep offenders on a very tight leash.”
Plus they are much cheaper than spending £48,000 a year throwing someone in jail – something Mr Chalk calls a “finishing school for criminals”.
Let us not pretend that some criminals do not deserve an old-fashioned stint in a cell.
But if I were a convict with a tag on my leg 24/7, I’d think twice before reoffending.
Dr. Thomas Hughes is a UK-based scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to readers. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
