Thousands of offenders across England and Wales will be fitted with electronic ankle tags that detect alcohol around the clock during the World Cup, an expansion strongly backed by County Durham and Darlington Police and Crime Commissioner Joy Allen. The PCC’s office confirmed the Government scheme will see more than 7,000 people released from prison or serving community sentences monitored for drinking throughout the tournament.
The tags sample sweat every 30 minutes and immediately alert probation officers if alcohol is consumed. Any breach can trigger a return to court or prison. Prisons, probation and reducing reoffending minister Lord James Timpson described the devices as a wake-up call. “Major sporting events should be a time for the country to come together and enjoy the game, not for alcohol-fuelled violence and disorder to ruin the occasion,” he said.
Joy Allen, who is also the joint national lead for addictions and substance misuse for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, pointed to the local cost of alcohol-related harm. “Nationally, more than half of all violent crime is linked to alcohol. In the North East alone, alcohol-related crime and disorder costs £812.4 million annually,” she said. Since the Ministry of Justice first deployed the tags in 2020, offenders banned from drinking have stayed sober on 97 per cent of the days they were monitored.
Alongside the tagging expansion, Durham Constabulary continues other targeted work to cut alcohol-driven offending. A £1 million investment in hotspot policing patrols and anti-crime pods in Darlington is already under way, and the commissioner has made the tags a central part of her Police, Crime and Justice Plan alongside treatment and custody-based testing programmes.
The tagging order applies to people released on licence from prison and those on community sentences who have an alcohol abstinence requirement. Lord Timpson said the constant surveillance left offenders with the sobering thought that “one slip-up could send them to jail.”
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