A 77-year-old activist is facing recall to prison because her wrists are too small for an electronic tag.
Gaie Delap, from Bristol, was sent to prison in August, along with four co-defendants, for her part in a campaign of disruptive protests on the M25 in November 2022.
Several months after she was jailed for the Just Stop Oil protests, she was let out after being told she qualified to serve the rest of her sentence under a home detention curfew.
But the company contracted to fit the tag to Delap was unable to attach one to her ankle because of a health condition, and there are no devices available small enough to fit wrists her size.
Now there is a warrant for her arrest after the company contacted the prison authorities to tell them she “could not be monitored”.
This is total bullshit of course, but fyi those straps have wires run through them to alarm on tampering, it’s not like a wristwatch.
Source: was a total nerd in high school and had an extremely cute friend ask me if it was possible to circumvent…as an engineering challenge of course.
That’s a fair point! But I can’t imagine that these things are impossible to take apart, if only for the sake of maintenance. Like, I wouldn’t expect them to do it on site, but somewhere up the line someone has to be capable of modifying it to fit.
Wouldn’t the wires just run around the circumference to prevent cutting the thing off? I’ve never seen one up close but I’d imagine they would have to if it’s anything like a wristwatch band or a miniature belt.
It’s not quite like that. This is a specialized device to let criminals serve jail sentences at home and needs to be pretty specialized and tamper proof. They also collect constant biometrics and more from multiple spots and are a bit black box to keep it from being common knowledge how to adjust or hack them.
This is silly but it’s not the device that’s making it silly and trying to figure it out how to get it on her instead of why she needs it is the issue.