Numerous felons are given permission to “work from home” while serving their community sentences.
According to statistics, 9,385 offenders received “independent working projects” in 2018, an increase from 3,680 in 2020.
As a result, criminals perform unpaid jobs like creating greeting cards and face masks at home to assist reduce a backlog of incomplete community projects that accrued during the pandemic.
This type of remote work was introduced during COVID-19, but it is still popular today. For less serious offenses including stealing, shoplifting, and some assaults, community sentencing sometimes include unpaid labour.
Offenders must work for 40 to 300 hours.
According to Labour, whose research produced the data, the rise in criminals “working from home” is undermining public confidence in community sentences.
Ministers, according to the party’s justice spokesman Steve Reed, “just let offenders free and let down victims.”
According to the Ministry of Justice, the “temporary program” would be discontinued by the fall.
According to research by Labour, the number of criminals serving community sentences who also received an “independent working project” as part of their sentence nearly tripled to 9,385 between 2020–21 and 202–22.
1,356,393 hours of unpaid work were completed in England and Wales in 2020–21. Projects involving independent labour made up 4.4% of the total, or 59,314 hours.
A year later, 3,573,421 hours of unpaid work were completed, of which independent working projects accounted for 274,324 hours, or 7.7%, of the total.
After community payback initiatives were put on hold during the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, a backlog of unpaid labour of hundreds of thousands of hours had developed.
More than 13,000 convicts had not finished the required number of hours of unpaid labour within a year of receiving their court-ordered punishment by the end of November of last year.
The probation service had to return before judges or magistrates to request an extension in order to avoid having their sentences written off, adding to the strain on courts that are already dealing with their own backlogs of cases.
Ministers, according to Mr. Reed, are “letting criminals off and letting victims down” by continuing to permit them to perform unpaid work from home as part of their sentence.
In order to restore public confidence in community punishments, he also urged the government to establish new “community and victim payback boards.”
In order to combat antisocial behavior before it escalates into more serious reoffending, the party intends to involve victim advocacy organizations and community members in decisions on the unpaid work that offenders must perform as part of community punishments.