A former federal agent from America with 27 years experience of catching violent sex offenders, was issuing the instructions.

"Sit down, sit up and look straight ahead," he said. "Put your feet flat on the floor, rest your palms on your knees and don't move."

On the chair I was sat on was a mat, and wired pads were stuck to my hands. I was told to raise my arms above my head so he could strap two coiled lengths of black plastic around my chest and abdomen.

An aneroid sphygmomanometer, otherwise known as a blood pressure measuring tool, was strapped around my right arm.

The cables were plugged into the laptop.

I was about to take the opening analysis for a polygraph test used by on sex offenders as part of a plan to manage them in the community after release from prison.

It is a new scheme being used in the Midlands to detect if sex offenders have breached their prison release conditions and is the latest tool in the authorities' arsenal to keep tabs on offenders in the community.

For example, if they are not allowed to go within a mile of a school, but do, and then answer 'no' during the test, their bodily reactions should give them away.

If the test signals that they are being untruthful, they will subjected to an investigation which could land them back in prison.

All those tested are also monitored under the Multi Agency Public Protection
Arrangement otherwise known as Mappa, a joint effort by police and probation services to supervise more than 50,000 sex offenders and violent criminals living in the community.

In Panorama: Freed to Offend Again we examine how this system - designed to protect us - actually works.

We meet the relatives of victims killed by monitored offenders, I go out with the police to meet a high-risk sex offender who claims he has changed and we gain exclusive access to a Mappa meeting as it decides the risk level of a man about to be released.

Each year the government publishes a report telling us the number of re-offences committed by 25% of those on the Mappa list deemed the most serious risks.

In its report for year from April 2007-March 2008, it was reported that only 79 serious further offences were committed by this group.

What they've not told us is the serious further offences committed by some of the other 75%.

Using freedom of information requests, we thought we'd try and find out. What we discovered was that, worrying, there were far more than the government has chosen to disclose.

Freed to Offend Again raises concerns that some offenders are not being monitored at the appropriate level and that those who are re-offending are not making it onto the official statistics released to the public.

The government says accuracy worries are behind a delay in plans to reveal the full re-offend figures among all of the Mappa offenders.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Those who have read my profile will know I spent many years in prison, so I have an insight, even if slightly outdated, about the inner workings of the prison system. The court of appeal quashed my conviction, for crimes I did not commit, in 2000 and I was freed from prison.

But not before I spent a number of years, in a number of different prisons and witnessed many drug deals and drug takers. I was there when the Mandatory Drug Test (MDT) was first introduced, back in 1996, so saw first hand the impact it had.

I had acquaintances that shifted from smoking cannabis to chasing the dragon, smoking heroin, in an attempt to avoid being caught by the MDT: A trace of heroin doesn't stay in your system as long as cannabis so the chances of being tested positively and punished were reduced.

My insight aside, the link between drugs, crime and prison is all too apparent. So what are the Government and prison service doing to break that link especially inside?
Many who work in this field argue if you can get criminals on drugs, off drugs, whilst they're serving a prison sentence the chance is they won't commit crime on the out to feed their habit. More than half of the 80,000-prison population test positive for drugs when entering jail.

The prison service spends more than 100 million a year on drug rehabilitation, but only 6 million is dedicated to disrupting the supply of drugs into prison.

So in "Smugglers' Tales" we ask if the prison service is doing enough to stop the flow of drugs and mobile phones getting into. We look at the technology and simple search methods.

Prisoners are not allowed mobile phones or use of the Internet. Prison officers are not even authorized to take their own mobile phones into prisons and anyone caught with one can be sentenced to 2 years inside.

Yet we have a couple of amazing stories where prisoners make phone calls from their cells using mobile phones. We hear a prisoner calling the police on a mobile from his cell trying to find out where a female prison officer is after she'd been arrested for attempting to bring him drugs.

There is a constant cat and mouse game played out by prisoners trying to get drugs, mobile phones or other contraband in and prison staff who are trying to keep it out.
I spent six days inside Woodhill Category A High Security prison in Milton Keynes, not as a prisoner this time, but as an observer.

The fact there were nearly 9,000 mobile phones and sim cards found in prisons last year, and nearly 5,000 individual drug seizures doesn't tell the whole story.

The prison services don't record the quantity or weight of each find, not all phones found are sent of for analysis and so the true extent of the problem is unknown.

The former head of prisons drugs strategy put the drug trade worth at 100 million a year. When I spoke with a prison source high up in security they put it at least 22 million.

There are five main routes for drugs to get into prisons: Visitors; corrupt staff; over the wall stuffed in dead pigeons or tennis balls; prisoners who attend court hearings expecting to go to jail and through the post.

We obtained some classic CCTV footage of drug handovers in visiting halls showing women pulling it out from between their legs and images of what look like parents, wives, friends and girlfriends slipping drug parcels to the prisoner.

It's a fact of life that there are drugs in every prison in the country.

The prison service accepts this and has a professional and motivated response, but it also recognizes it is a challenge that will need constant adaptation to match the ingenious methods used to get drugs and mobile phones in.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Whatever Happened to People Power? is our look at the concerns people have about their right to stand up and be counted when they demand action on the issues they care about.

We met protesters who do not fit the image of what a lot of people might think an activist looks like.

Peter Harbour worked as a physicist all his adult life without a blemish on his record. Yet when he and other local people decided to challenge a power company's plans to fill in the last of their local countryside lakes with ash, a court issued them with an injunction that stopped them in their tracks.

The company, npower, said it had applied for the injunction because its staff were being harassed and threatened by activists connected to the squatters occupying an empty building on its land.

What's more, that injunction, naming six people including Mr Harbour, appeared on a police website dedicated to tackling domestic extremists - a development that frightened both Mr Harbour and many of the law-abiding locals. Although in the end their campaign was successful and the power company abandoned its plans, Mr Harbour was left shocked by the way he and his fellow campaigners were treated.

We also met Hannah McClure, a 21-year-old student and a veteran of several direct action campaigns. Hannah agrees that protesters are being treated unfairly. She told me that while she's been arrested for taking direct action on environmental issues, she was not prepared for what happened in a squat where about 80 demonstrators spent the night in an empty office building following the G20 protests in central London.

In Whatever Happened to People Power?, we show amateur video footage of the moment when 100 police officers stormed the building - two armed with Taser guns - threatening those inside.

On the tape you can hear the squatters' fear as one shouts out "They're going to kill one of us".

The police told us they behaved with justifiable caution as they did not know what to expect when they went into the building and had information that some inside were violent. In the end, only two of the squatters were arrested and neither has been charged with any offence.

In the programme, we look at these instances and others that raise questions about police tactics when dealing with protesters.

It's easy to understand the frustration and stress officers are put under when confronted by verbally aggressive protesters who scream and shout and swear inches from their faces as they hold a line at a demonstration.

The question I asked the Metropolitan Police's Assistant Commissioner was whether it was ever justified to punch a protester in the face, whack them with a baton or bash them with a riot shield - all examples that were caught on camera and appear in our programme.

The Met told me that officers are trained to use only appropriate force and are held accountable for their actions.

It is the use of force by the police, captured on camera and played out to the public via social networking sites that has damaged the public's confidence in the police - a point made in last week's Home Affairs Select Committee report on the G20.

The committee described the overall police operation as remarkably successful, but added that this was in part down to luck rather than judgement.

To find out more, watch Panorama: Whatever Happened to People Power?, BBC One, Monday, 6 July at 8.30pm.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?