Paedophiles should be forced to take lie detector test before being released from prison, ex-police chief says
PAEDOPHILES should be forced to take a lie detector test before being released from jail, an ex-police chief has said.
Jim Gamble QPM, the former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command, said there should be “no automatic release” for paedophiles after serving half their sentence unless they can show they are no longer a threat to children.
Sexual predators are forced to take government lie detector tests every six months as part of their licence conditions after serving a jail term.
But Mr Gamble said he wanted them to be used to test paedophiles before they are released in the first instance.
He told the Daily Telegraph: “There should be an automatic trigger [for paedophiles], as the Human Rights Act requires, for release to be considered. But that should only be done where an evidence-based judgment is made to suggest that individual no longer represents a risk.
“Every person involved in sexual offence should be subject to a polygraph.”
The £4,000 machines are hooked up to monitor heart rate, brain activity, sweating and blood pressure, during questioning from trained inquisitors.
Mr Gamble, who appeared in the Netflix documentary about Madeleine McCann, also said he wanted to see more sexual predators arrested and caged to create a “credible deterrent” for those going online to groom children and view indecent images.
It came after the Home Office said last month that it was considering alternatives to locking up paedophiles, such as imposing civil penalties.
The National Police Chiefs Council also said it was struggling to cope with more than 400 people being arrested over indecent images every month.
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Paedophiles have been made to take government lie detector tests following their release from jail as part of a scheme rolled out in 2014.
It was lauded by then-Justice Minister Jeremy Wright as the latest “stringent” measure to crackdown on sex offenders on licence.
Questions typically relate to a sex attacker’s “licence conditions and whether they have been breached” and other “risk-related behaviours” such as masturbating to offence-related fantasies.
However last year we revealed how only one in 13 sex offenders have been returned to jail for failing a lie detector test.
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