TAGGED CRIMINALS 'CAN BREAK CURFEW'

Inmates released early from prison will only face automatic re-arrest if they break the whole of their curfew - typically 12 hours - in one go, inspectors found.

By being at home for as little as a few minutes, they could qualify for a warning, they said. Only when they break their order a second time will they be re-arrested.

The report also revealed a more than third of those given tags broke the terms of their orders.

Tags can be given to prisoners for the last four and a half months of a sentence of less than four years. They can also be given out as punishment in themselves. Criminals must spend their curfew time at a particular address during the times set out by the courts.

A joint inspection by police, probation and court inspectors found rules for enforcing tags were not what the public would expect.

Andrew Bridges, HM Chief Inspector of Probation said it "doesn't seem right" that criminals were given so much leeway. "We found that enforcement policy with court-sentenced curfews is significantly different both from the way other community requirements are enforced and from what the courts and the public might reasonably expect," Mr Bridges said.

He called for a "major re-think" of how the orders are applied adding that they "did not promote compliance".

He said the rules were deliberately designed to prevent too many prisoners breaking them. "The intention of this approach was to avoid breaching too many cases, while also avoiding publicising to offenders the fact that curfews were not as strict in practice as they might first appear," he said.

"Ironically, we nevertheless found that a high proportion (a third) of court-sentenced electronically monitored curfew cases still reached the point of requiring breach action."