Dan Kaminski

Mike Nellis

Kristel Beyens

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a way of supervising offenders in the community whilst they are on bail, serving a community sentence or after release from prison. Various technologies can be used, including voice verification, GPS satellite tracking and – most commonly - the use of radio frequency to monitor house arrest. It originated in the USA in the 1980s and has spread to over 30 countries since then. This book explores the development of EM in a number of countries to give some indication of the diverse ways it has been utilized and of the complex politics which surrounds its use. A techno-utopian impulse underpins the origins of EM and has remained latent in its subsequent development elsewhere in the world, despite recognition that is it less capable of effecting penal transformations than its champions have hoped. This book devotes substantive chapters to the issues of privatisation, evaluation, offender perspectives and ethics. Whilst normatively more committed to the Swedish model, the book acknowledges that this may not represent the future of EM, whose untrammelled, commercially-driven development could have very alarming consequences for criminal justice. Both utopian and dystopian hopes have been invested in EM, but research on its impact is ambivalent and fragmented, and EM remains undertheorised, empirically and ethically. This book seeks to redress this by providing academics, policy audiences and practitioners with the intellectual resources to understand and address the challenges which EM poses.

International and Critical Perspectives

Electronically Monitored Punishment

Catherine Jones-Finer

Via a mutual concern with social exclusion, the agendas of criminology and social policy have begun to overlap far more in recent years. The two fields have always shared a common concern with class, and more recently with race and gender, but remained rigorously differentiated until crime prevention moved higher on political and academic agendas in the 1980s. This collection of papers explores aspects of social exclusion and the measures taken to reduce its impact from the perspective of both disciplines. The contributors write mainly, though not exclusively, from a British perspective, However the issues raised are of broader relevance to North America, Europe and elsewhere. Criminology in Britain has recently been examining the way in which political initiatives designed to contain and exclude dispossessed populations (seen to constitute major crime risks) have permeated all areas of criminal justice policy. In America this has led to an increased emphasis on the rhetoric of retribution, and the 'management' of criminal classes, shifting away from earlier emphasis on 'rehabilitating' individual offenders. Critics of this development increasingly recognise that more practical answers to crime involve not more penal repression but social policies designed to integrate and include the dispossessed, especially the young. It is in this connection that the experience of Singapore offers a different sort of warning.

Mike Nellis

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