Section one Context where they are fixed-term sentences of seven years or more in length.43 The Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act 2019 received Royal Assent in July 2019, creating changes in the management of people serving sentences outside of prison. The Act strengthens powers of recall from home detention curfew (HDC) by introducing a new offence (of remaining unlawfully at large) and granting police greater powers to help apprehend anyone who absconds. It also enables courts to add electronic monitoring to a Community Payback Order, enabling the use of GPS and remote substance monitoring technology, in addition to the radio frequency technology currently used with curfew tags.44 The new Act followed the publication of reviews of HDC by HMIPS and HMICS in 2018. There were further changes to the guidance on HDC in Scotland, published in December 2019. In May 2019, HMICS published Strategic Review – an independent assessment of Police Scotland’s response to a breach of Home Detention Curfew – progress review, having conducted fieldwork in April and May 2019, testing the progress of the 16 recommendations. 43 44 45 46 47 Reviews into prison conditions in England and Wales The House of Commons Justice Committee’s report of its inquiry, Prison Population 2022: planning for the future, was published in April 2019. It found that over the past 25 years, the prison population in England and Wales has almost doubled in size, but that capacity has not kept pace with demand. The inquiry heard that staffing shortages and other disruptions have severely undermined the delivery of rehabilitative services in prisons. The Committee concluded that this creates immeasurable wasted costs and recommended an overarching strategy for reoffending with significant additional resources for cross-departmental provision.45 Following this, in October 2019 the Justice Committee published the report of its inquiry on prison governance. Recommendations included a repeated recommendation that the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO), the national structure of Independent Monitoring Boards and the NPM should be put on a proper statutory footing.46 The Prison Performance Support Programme, a new intensive support programme which aims to help ‘challenging’ prisons to improve safety and rehabilitation, was introduced in February 2020. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) reports that more staff, new technology and maintenance improvements will play a key role.47 The initiative sits alongside the government’s £2.75 billion investment plans, which focus on prison security, creating additional prison places and tackling pressing maintenance issues in existing UK Government, The Release of Prisoners (Alteration of Relevant Proportion of Sentence) Order 2019, https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2019/9780111190524 [accessed 24/08/2020] UK Government, Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act 2019, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2019/14/notes/ division/4/1/1 [accessed 24/08/2020] Justice Committee, April 2019, Prisons crisis: Government’s current approach inefficient, ineffective and unsustainable, https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/102/justice-committee/news/99437/prisons-crisis-governments-currentapproach-inefficient-ineffective-and-unsustainable/ [accessed 24/08/2020] House of Commons Justice Committee, October 2019, Prison Governance: First Report of Session 2019, https:// publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201919/cmselect/cmjust/191/191.pdf [accessed 30/10/2020] MoJ, February 2020, Press release: New support plan to improve jails, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/newsupport-plan-to-improve-jails [accessed 24/08/2020] 21