Not Invented Here: sobriety tags

A researcher ignores her own evidence

Crime is the most serious negative externality associated with alcohol. Being drunk does not absolve an individual of responsibility, but there is no denying that some people become reckless and aggressive when they are drunk. According to the ONS, 38% of all violent crime is carried out when the perpetrator is under the influence of alcohol.

Everyone knows this, not least the ‘public health’ lobby who have campaigned against longer opening hours and lower alcohol taxes on the basis that they will (supposedly) lead to more crime. You would think they would they would be delighted to find a new way to reduce alcohol-related crime. But you would be wrong.

In 2022, the Institute of Alcohol Studies (the successor to the UK Temperance Alliance) published a blog post by the criminologist and alcohol researcher Carly Lightowlers about transdermal alcohol monitoring devices, otherwise known as sobriety tags. These devices are sometimes given to people who have been given a community or suspended sentence after being convicted of committing a crime whilst drunk. They are required to give up alcohol for up to 120 days and the tag monitors alcohol through the person’s sweat.

Lightowlers was instinctively opposed to what she called ‘coerced alcohol abstinence’ (although these people would have been forced to abstain from alcohol if they were in prison). She called it “a reactionary policy that does not address the upstream sources of problematic alcohol consumption.” She suggested that it was a distraction from the “the widespread availability and cultural positioning of alcohol in British society”. And - perhaps worst of all her from her perspective - it was “at odds with the public health approach” which portrays society, the government and the alcohol industry as being to blame for alcohol-related harm, rather than mere individuals.

Her most damning claim was that sobriety tags had been rolled out “despite little evidence they would reduce offending”. If you are interested in practical solutions, this is the key point. Do they actually work? To her credit, Lightowlers decided to find out by conducting her own research. Her study has now been published and this week she returned to the Institute of Alcohol Studies blog to tell us about it.

She analysed 647,559 records from the probation and magistrates’ court and compared outcomes between criminals who were forced to abstain from alcohol and criminals who were put on an alcohol treatment programme. The latter is the institutional preference in public health and includes things like group therapy, speaker meetings and the distribution of literature.

The results were striking. The people who were required to undergo ‘coercive abstinence’ were 33% less likely to reoffend whereas the people given treatment were 21% more likely to reoffend. This is not the first time that alcohol treatment for prisoners have been shown to be ineffective. A study for the Ministry of Justice in 2018 found that it was virtually useless.

What good news! We can stop wasting time with enforced alcohol treatment programmes and use sobriety tags instead. Not only will it mean less crime but we won’t have to spend so much money employing people to supervise the sessions.

But not so fast. “Despite these encouraging findings,” she writes, “I still urge caution about tagging”. Although her research has shown the treatment programmes to be worthless at best, she does not call for a moratorium on them and even implies that there should be more of them. Unusually for an academic promoting her work, she emphasises “the limitations of my study” although she doesn’t say anywhere in her blog post or in her study what those limitations are. She calls on policy makers to “reflect further” on the “punitive and rehabilitative ideals sitting behind alcohol tagging” and says that there is “a lot that could be done to reduce harm and crime associated with alcohol consumption that doesn’t involve criminal justice interventions”.

This sounds an awful lot like whataboutery. It is possible to do more than one thing at a time so why “urge caution” about something that is proven to work? In her previous blog post, she had claimed that regulating “the environment in which alcohol is marketed” is one of the “most effective [ways of] reducing alcohol-related harm”, but whilst this is the institutional preference of the neo-temperance lobby, the evidence that alcohol bans reduce alcohol-related harm is actually very weak.

Let us leave aside the fact that the criminal justice system is supposed to be ‘punitive’ and that the ‘public health’ preference for using taxes and bans to make the whole population drink less is highly coercive. What we have here is another example of the thread that runs through the Not Invented Here series: a pragmatic solution being disparaged on essentially moral grounds by someone who would prefer to radically restructure the whole of society in a way that is simply never going to happen (if I were in charge I would simply solve “the underlying health and social issues related to alcohol problems”). Refusing to change your mind in the face of evidence is a classic symptom.