Prisoners to be “tagged like dogs”

Well welcome to my blog. This is my first post and I’ll start as I mean to go on.

Ministers in the United Kingdom Government are planning to introduce one of the most abhorrent and draconian infringements upon our Civil Liberties and Human Rights that they have introduced in their last 10 years in Government!

The Independent on Sunday [13 Jan 2008] revealed plans by ministers to reform the tagging systems we have in the UK to monitor offenders who have been released into the community. Instead of a tag around ones ankle Ministers are proposing to implant, by way of an injection, a tracking device the length of two grains of rice into the arm of offenders released into the community.

The current tag around the ankle is enough of an infringement upon one’s person and privacy without a piece of electronics being placed into the body in order to track and monitor us!

The mentality of “we track cars, so why not people” is worrying. People are not the property of the state and as such the state should stop treating us as such. Big Brother is well and truly watching us in society and the government seem to be getting more and more power over us. If the government cannot see the difference between a car and a person then we are truly living in a time of desperation.

George Orwell wrote a very famous novel entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is horrifying how society is developing at a rapid pace into an Orwellian world. I believe that Orwell provided us with a very valuable warning, but this warning has been taken as an instruction manual by the people we elect into Parliament.

There will be some people who argue that this is a good way forward. To you I say beware. The Government can never have such powers over the citizenry. The more liberty we give up the less freedom we have and we go down a slippery slope to an autocratic police state.

This system will not make us any safer or provide any more security against paedophiles, murders, rapists or any other offender the government decides to open this system up to. It is argued that this will remove the potential for people to evade the system, but it will not be long before someone finds a way around the system. How do the government propose to stop people digging this tracking device out of their own bodies? The answer is that they cannot stop a person doing such a thing, so it does nothing to remove the possibility of the person removing the tag.

Also, what signal does this send out to the pubic? Those offenders who are not in prison supposedly pose no threat or danger to society, but yet the state feels compelled to monitor and track their every move? If they’re not a danger of threat to society why do they need to be monitored and tracked? The answer is they don’t. This is just another draconian and useless idea to cut prison numbers without having to build new prisons.

Who would have thought that words spoken in 1759 would be so pertinent in 2008? It was 1759 when Benjamin Franklin said “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”