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Were a filmmaker looking for a location to shoot a dystopian thriller, they could do worse than choose the Ministry of Justice’s Westminster offices. 102 Petty France, a brutalist masterpiece, looks like the sort of place Winston Smith might have waited for his appointment in Room 101. It seems appropriate, then, that this forbidding building is the birthplace of the Government’s new 2026 Sentencing Act, introducing “restriction zones” for offenders. Creating a kind of digital panopticon using geofencing technology, GPS-tagged offenders will be expected to comply with strict geographical boundaries, preventing them from harassing or accidentally encountering their victims.
This, the Government claims, offers bespoke protection for individuals while mitigating the risks presented by prison early-release schemes. Theoretically, offenders breaching the zones might face being returned to prison, giving peace of mind to victims of stalking, domestic violence and sexual offenses. It was reported on Sunday that restriction zones will start to appear in October.
Victims groups have welcomed the initiative. A spokeswoman for the Joanna Simpson Foundation, a domestic violence charity, declared the rollout of the zones “a much-needed change that has long been called for and is a powerful step forward”. Victims have for years complained that knowing abusers are free to roam their communities offers a constant source of pain and distress. I wonder, though, whether they will find themselves disappointed with the policy in practice; theoretical models of offender-control crack like eggs when dropped onto the pavement of reality. Incentives to not reoffend tend not to take into account many offenders’ irrational behavior, occasionally caused by substance abuse or mental health issues.
The Zones raise further questions too, about penal reform, justice and civil liberties — are our criminal justice elites trying to be too clever by half? Hunkered down in their brutalist eyrie, did Ministry of Justice mandarins imagine they’d square the circle of cost-cutting and placating the powerful penal reform lobby, which is generally skeptical about the concept of imprisonment? Now, rather than being locked up, violent offenders can instead be rehabilitated in communities, inside virtual-reality prisons. For now, the Zones are aimed at violent offenders, but what — or who — comes next? Would this model of control be considered for other types of offending, such as burglary or robbery too? Will the restriction zone model offer comfort to victims, or are they a window into a future of soft totalitarianism? And, crucially, will they ever really protect the public from violent criminals?
Towards the end of my police career, I worked for the UK Protected Persons Service (UKPPS). My duties involved what’s known as “witness protection”: that is, monitoring offenders who posed potential risks to vulnerable witnesses. As such, I often worked with the police teams responsible for delivering Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements [MAPPA] — the public protection world is laden with acronyms. These were locally-based officers responsible for the management of high-risk offenders. Their remit included yet another public protection acronym, MOSOVO, or “management of sexual or violent offenders”. None of these acronyms, however, are adequate in describing modern offender management in practice. In my experience, put-upon police and probation officers operate a system held together with optimism and duct-tape. Monitoring offenders is one thing — intercepting and managing them face-to-face is another.
In my experience, MAPPA fails to mitigate the underlying problem with offender management: the progressive-coded rehabilitative bias that affects criminal justice in general, and probation specifically. As the former police officer-turned-policy analyst Rory Geoghegan wrote: “The ideology centers the offender as a vulnerable individual with ‘criminogenic needs’ which the state must understand and address.”
This means that while a violent but newly-released rapist might be an ongoing threat to women and girls, he’s still an individual with “agency” and rights. How dare the authorities harass him? Which is what offender management is, really. Gently intrusive harassment, with a smile and a cup of tea. As ever, the carrots and sticks used by the police to protect the public are both in short supply. Sticks are surrendered to an administrative state in thrall to progressive dogma, carrots to accountants. Most police officers would agree that a sex offender held in a secure environment, with opportunities for rehabilitation, is more likely to protect victims than a GPS tag and harsh words. We used to refer to such places as prisons — hardly an appropriate word for the three-kilometer radius of an offender’s home address. Except the prisons have suffered the same death-by-parsimony as the rest of the criminal justice system. As, indeed, is the ever-struggling probation service.
The restriction zone project will rely on probation officers working with victims of crime to create bespoke safety plans, identifying where an offender might not be allowed to travel without breaching his or her virtual incarceration. The problem with this, of course, is the probation service’s questionable performance, not to mention the problematic relationship the private sector has enjoyed with monitoring prisoners at all. Scandals have concerned equipment and administrative failures, causing dangerous safety gaps for police and probation officers.
Again we can discern the spirit of optimism and duct-tape lingers. One can imagine an operations room in a busy urban area, multiple lights bleeping on a map as dozens of “supervised” offenders probe the perimeters of their virtual cages. Who will assess risk? Send patrols to intercept rogue offenders? Will the police, still trying to extricate themselves from the burden of acting as mental health auxiliaries, find new work as ersatz prison warders too? Other areas of policing offer clues to the resource demands around monitoring or protecting individuals. A police close protection team might demand between six-to-eight officers to protect their “principal” for a 24-hour period. Three 10-strong mobile surveillance teams are necessary to covertly report on a human suspect’s movements over a similar period. Perhaps, one day, AI-controlled robots will patrol the Government’s invisible Temu gulags, but until then?
The reality of the restriction zone project, one unmentioned in any Ministry of Justice press release, is this: managing violent offenders in the community is, at best, a game of whack-a-mole. I once spoke with a detective on an east London borough where a team of four managed around 600 high-risk registered sex offenders. And London has 32 boroughs. Furthermore, officers working in offender management have a limited toolbox at their disposal. The hammers and nails involve sanctions when an offender breaches their license, meaning they might be returned to that same prison system that is so keen to release prisoners.
The rest of the time? The police compile reports on how offenders engage with the MAPPA regime. Their demeanor. Their life circumstances. Are they complying with probation? Have they tried to contact any victims? This is where struggling police forces interface with equally struggling probation services. Any system which creates more tagged offenders limited to strictly-defined geographical zones will add an extra burden to a system — the BBC reported that 32% of probation appointments with high-risk sex offenders, between 2023 and 2025, were missed due to workload issues. The success of the restriction zone project will come down to whether it can reduce in reoffending rates and prison returns. Sadly, the authorities have a poor record of anticipating, deterring and managing known risks. The cases of human time-bombs like Axel Rudakubana and Valdo Calocane show how knowing someone is dangerous is a completely different proposition from protecting the public from them. The themes, for Britain’s criminal-justice elites, are deeply uncomfortable: mental health, resources, human rights and race. Then there are questions of competence: why are police forces increasingly incapable of public protection?
As a former policeman, I’m used to the consequences of second-order effects. No doubt this project will create new challenges for the officers charged with protecting us from predators such as the serial sex offender Simon Levy or the murderer Jordan McSweeney, both men who were known to be highly likely to reoffend. Sadly, the Ministry of Justice “proof of concept” turns on the lives of the innocent. Statistics suggest that in 2024, one murder a week was committed by offenders on probation. Then, when the optimism dies and the duct-tape breaks, those blamed for systems failure will be ordinary police and probation officers, their seniors lawyering-up for the inevitable public inquiries.
Instead, we have a cash-strapped civil service, one obliged to pay lip service to those theories of “criminogenic needs.” The Ministry of Justice have worked with the paltry resources at their disposal to offer geographic detention, monitored by outsourced technology and enforced by a shoestring police service. Meanwhile, policymakers and mandarins continue with the disestablishment of traditional criminal sanctions. To their minds, rapists and murderers can be managed via the penal equivalent of “20-minute neighborhoods” or planned parking zones. Turning offender management into a technical adjunct to town and country planning might sound novel, but I doubt it will work in practice.
What about the Home Office’s latest wheeze, offering asylum-seekers from developing countries pamphlets politely asking them not to commit sexual offenses? Perhaps that’s another window into our near-future of anarcho-tyranny, one where murderers overstepping invisible restriction zones receive a drone-delivered missive reminding them — gently ± not to rape or murder. Alternatively, of course, we could simply build better prisons, until the innate goodness of the human spirit so beloved of penal reformers finally manifests itself. Until that rapture, though, will they spare a thought for the rest of us?