Scottish and International Review of the Uses of Electronic Monitoring

This Review provides a bounded overview of Scottish and international evidence and experience of the uses, purposes and impact of electronic monitoring (EM)

Electronic Monitoring in Scotland

This research report examines the current uses of electronic monitoring (EM) tagging technology in the Scottish criminal justice system. Findings and recommendations released in this report by Stirling criminologists Prof Gill McIvor and Dr Hannah Graham indicate support among criminal justice practitioners to make key changes to the use of electronic monitoring tagging in Scotland. Their study sought the views of criminal justice social workers, Scottish Prison Service staff, sheriffs, the Parole Board for Scotland, Police Scotland, G4S monitoring staff, Scottish Government policymakers, and a third sector organisation. The themes and findings presented here form one part of an EU-funded international comparative research project involving five jurisdictions: England and Wales, Scotland, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Significantly, this is the first comparative study of its kind of electronic monitoring in Europe

Electronic Monitoring in the Criminal Justice System

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a generic term that encompasses a number of monitoring technologies and approaches. It can be used with different people for diverse purposes in youth justice and adult criminal justice systems (Nellis, Beyens and Kampinski, 2013). For the last 30 years, numerous western countries have predominantly used EM to monitor adult offenders’ compliance with curfews and other restrictions. The emergence of new EM technologies opens up new monitoring and surveillance possibilities to authorities, but proportionality and balancing the rights and interests of different people involved are integral to effective and ethical uses of EM. This is reflected in Council of Europe guidance on standards and ethics in EM (Nellis, 2015). ThisInsight introduces the ways in which EM is currently used in Scotland, alongside international evidence and experience, to identify key issues and implications for use

Advancing electronic monitoring in Scotland: Understanding the influences of localism and professional ideologies

Scotland has one of the highest prison population rates in Western Europe, coinciding with a recent growth in interest in electronic monitoring (EM) as a potential mechanism for diversion and decarceration. Scotland also has a relatively sophisticated suite of community sanctions and measures – from which court-imposed and prison-imposed EM orders have, for 15 years, been largely kept separate, until now. This article analyses the perspectives of Scottish practitioners and decision-makers regarding current stand-alone uses of electronic monitoring, canvassing relevant Scottish jurisdictional findings from within a larger European comparative research project. It reveals localised, institutional and professional differences in the Scottish criminal justice field. Our analysis demonstrates that Scottish practitioners want more integration in principle, but forewarns that the extent of their support may depend on how and by whom this is done in practice

The influences of electronic monitoring in desistance processes: practitioner and decision-maker perspectives

This article canvasses practitioner and decision-maker perspectives of the influences of electronic monitoring (EM) in processes of desistance from crime, with a particular focus on their views of its use with young people aged 16 to 25 years old. Presenting findings from a qualitative mixed methods study, we offer a bounded exploration of the views of different actors working in the Scottish criminal justice field, which are framed and analysed here through the lenses of desistance scholarship. This article focuses on one facet of empirical findings from the research conducted in Scotland - participant perspectives of the uses and effects of electronic monitoring for young adults in desistance processes. Overall, the Scottish jurisdictional findings and recommendations are much wider, and form part of a larger European comparative research project involving four other jurisdictions: England & Wales, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands

Measurement invariance in the assessment of people with an intellectual disability

Intellectual assessment is central to the process of diagnosing an intellectual disability and the assessment process needs to be valid and reliable. One fundamental aspect of validity is that of measurement invariance, i.e. that the assessment measures the same thing in different populations. There are reasons to believe that measurement invariance of the Wechsler scales may not hold for people with an intellectual disability. Many of the issues which may influence factorial invariance are common to all versions of the scales. The present study, therefore, explored the factorial validity of the WAIS-III as used with people with an intellectual disability. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess goodness of fit of the proposed four factor model using 13 and 11 subtests. None of the indices used suggested a good fit for the model, indicating a lack of factorial validity and suggesting a lack of measurement invariance of the assessment with people with an intellectual disability. Several explanations for this and implications for other intellectual assessments were discussed