Crackdown on crime bosses running their empires from jail
Crime bosses are to face new court-ordered curbs to prevent them running criminal empires from their prison cells.
An independent review into sentencing will recommend on Thursday that criminals should be subject to court orders while still in prison so that National Crime Agency and police investigators can open up their bank accounts, ban contact with named associates and intercept communications.
These serious crime prevention orders (SCPOs) would also force them to reveal any documents or answer any questions, including names of associates, by investigating officers. If they were found to have breached the orders, they could face up to five years extra in jail.
At present, SCPOs can only last for a maximum of five years and do not kick in until after a criminal is released from prison.
David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, believes that as well as disrupting their crime business, the orders could provide police officers with leads and insights into the jailed bosses' criminal networks.
The moves will be allied to a new criminal receivership scheme to expand the powers of law enforcement to seize and sell all the assets of offenders who have made millions from their criminal enterprises.
Mr Gauke said: 'Serious and organised criminals should not be able to run a criminal enterprise from prison, nor return to a life of wealth when they are released. Put simply, crime must not pay.
'The Government should strengthen existing financial monitoring tools, and consider a new system to enable them to seize all assets to effectively punish offenders who have benefited from a life of crime.'
Ministers are concerned that confiscation orders, meant to take back money made from crime, are not working as well as they should. While there is thought to be a pile of potential criminal assets worth more than £2.7 billion, only around £214 million is currently considered recoverable.
Under the receivership scheme, a court-appointed receiver would be able to take control of any criminal's money and property to make them pay back for their crimes.
Unlike current orders, all assets, both legally and illegally earned over the course of an offender's life, would be covered. It would be a form of criminal bankruptcy, without offering any debt relief, making it a deliberately severe and uncompromising form of punishment.
Crime bosses inside jail are known to control much of the sale and flow of drugs into jails, many imported by drones, because of the huge profits to be made from selling them in prisons.
Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said even high-security jails have ceded their air space to drug drones in a move that threatens national security.
The proposed crackdown comes alongside proposals, revealed this week by The Telegraph, to deport foreign offenders as soon as they are convicted in a bid to tackle prison overcrowding.
Burglars, drug dealers and offenders convicted of assault who have been sentenced to under three years in prison will be removed from the UK as 'soon as operationally possible' rather than serving their time in Britain, as is currently the case.
The sentencing review aims to enable the Government to avoid running out of prison cells, with forecasts that it will be 9,500 spaces short by spring 2026, even with its £4.7 billion prison-building programme.
Other measures to be recommended include the release of prisoners as little as a third of the way through their sentences if they behave well, as revealed last week by The Telegraph.
There will also be a presumption against sending criminals to jail for under one year and greater use of community punishments, with a major expansion of electronic tagging to create digital 'prisons outside of prisons'.
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