A €1.6 million pilot project to electronically tag released prisoners and suspects on bail will be rolled out five years after the Government abandoned a similar project over value for money concerns.
Justice and prison officials view the introduction of electronic tagging as vital to ease the overcrowding problem in Irish jails which has now reached crisis levels.
As of Thursday there were just under 5,800 people in Irish prisons, far surpassing last year’s record numbers. Prisons are currently at 123 per cent capacity.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice asked private companies to tender for a pilot project to provide 30 electronic tags over a 12-month period. These will be used on between 50 and 90 people.
READ MORE
Additional tags may be acquired in batches of 10, and the programme may be extended for an additional year, it said. The entire project will cost about €1.58 million plus VAT. Should the programme be successful, it will be rolled out across the system at a much greater cost.
Initially, only people on bail or on temporary release from prison will be electronically tagged. However, this may soon be expanded to convicted sex offenders subject to court orders and former inmates subject to post-release supervision orders.
The tags will be used to ensure subjects abide by curfews and stay within certain areas. They will also be used to enforce exclusion zones and ensure sex offenders do not enter certain locations, such as areas where their victims live.
The project will examine if electronic monitoring can “contribute to a reduction in the number of people in prisons” if it can provide an alternative to prison for less serious offenders and reduce recidivism.
The new programme goes further than the previous abandoned pilot which applied only to prisoners on temporary release. It ran between 2018 and 2019 and involved the tagging of about 20 prisoners at a time.
The programme cost €727,000 before it was shelved. “Following a review in 2020, the Irish Prison Service, in consultation with the Department of Justice, decided not to renew the contract in January 2021 for value-for-money reasons,” the service previously said.
The use of electronic tagging has a mixed history in Ireland. A pilot programme for 31 prisoners, which took place in 2010, was beset with technical issues. Most of the equipment malfunctioned and some offenders had to keep the devices in their pockets after the straps broke. Two women offenders had to cut the devices off after their legs swelled up.
A review of the pilot programme recommended the continued use of tagging but only on a small scale.
Separately, the Irish Prison Service will acquire monitoring technology to detect if prisoners are suffering medical emergencies.
It follows a large rise in the number of prisoner deaths recently. Deaths in custody rose by 50 per cent to 31 last year.
The new “signs of life” technology will be rolled out on a pilot basis at a cost of €500,000.
