BORIS BASHES BINGERS!

It was reported last year that London Mayor Boris Johnson wanted anyone convicted of an alcohol-related violent offence to be banned from drinking, and to report to their local police station once a day for a ‘sobriety test’ – on pain of imprisonment, if they failed! Quite rightly the Government dismissed this proposal and you might have thought that would be the end of it. But, no! Boris is back with a high-tech solution from America: a “sobriety bracelet scheme”, for those convicted of serious drink-related offences.

It works like this: On conviction for a drink-related offence the Court orders a community sentence, but imposes a ‘sobriety condition’; the offender must abstain from drinking alcohol for a set period of time, say, six months. To enforce this, the offender is fitted with an ankle bracelet that can detect alcohol by measuring air and perspiration emissions from the skin every 30 minutes. Blood alcohol levels as low as 0.02% can apparently be detected, and the bracelets can tell when the alcohol was consumed and then electronically transmit that information to a monitoring station. The police are then informed that the offender has broken his ‘sobriety condition’ and can arrest him and bring him before the court.

The Ministry of Justice has provided £400,000 to trial this scheme in London. In October it was announced that the equipment was being introduced in Scotland as part of a pilot scheme for violent offenders on community sentences.

I have three major concerns about this: firstly, I think we shouldn’t simply judge a policy on the basis of its intended outcomes, but also on what it says about the relationship between the State and the individual. And this scheme smacks far too much of ‘Brave New World’ for me.

Secondly, my suspicion is it will not reduce alcohol-related crime, but simply fill up the prisons with lots of young men on short sentences who “breach their tag” – even though the original offence for which they were tagged didn’t merit a prison sentence.

And thirdly, it’s not difficult to imagine a development of this technology so that it could be applied to the operation of individual licensed premises. I can imagine the Government empowering licensing authorities to require premises in the night-time economy to provide a bracelet to every customer on a Friday and Saturday night. If the customer consumes more than, say, four units of alcohol, this is electronically communicated to a unit behind the bar, the bracelet illuminates and the customer has to leave. But surely I’m being paranoid, right? Surely no government is going to regulate the tick-and-tock of individual behaviour in this way? That’s precisely what people said when the smoking ban was first mooted. Watch this space.