From offender to victim-oriented monitoring : a comparative analysis of the emergence of electronic monitoring systems in Argentina and England and Wales

The increasingly psychological terrain of crime and disorder management has had a transformative impact upon the use of electronic monitoring technologies. Surveillance technologies such as electronic monitoring ‑ EM, biometrics, and video surveillance have flourished in commercial environments that market the benefits of asocial technologies in managing disorderly behavior and which, despite often chimerical crime prevention promises, appeal to the ontologically insecure social imagination. The growth of EM in criminal justice has subsequently taken place despite, at best, equivocal evidence that it protects the public and reduces recidivism. Innovative developments in Portugal, Argentina and the United States have re-imagined EM technologies as more personalized devices that can support victims rather than control offenders. These developments represent a re-conceptualization of the use of the technology beyond the neoliberal prism of rational choice theories and offender-oriented thinking that influenced first generation thinking about EM. This paper identifies the socio-political influences that helped conceptualize first generation thinking about EM as, firstly, a community sentence and latterly, as a technique of urban security. The paper reviews attempts to theorize the role and function of EM surveillance technologies within and beyond criminal justice and explores the contribution of victimological perspectives to the use of EM 2.0

Parole and probation in a prison nation

I spent six weeks in July/August 2001 teaching summer school at Northern Kentucky University, and learning, at first hand as often as possible, something about criminal justice in this corner of the United States. Although Kentucky-based, the nearest urban centre was Cincinnati, just across the state border, and I had most contact with criminal justice people in Ohio. I was not doing systematic research, and all I assembled was a patchwork of impressions, lacking in comprehensiveness – but supplemented by reading newspapers and books that are not easily accessed in Britain. One of them, by Wall Street journalist Joseph Hallinan (2001), characterises America as a “Prison Nation”, because it imprisons (on average) 600 per 100,000 people, and because it is now building prisons to galvanise flagging rural economies as much as to combat crime in a coherent and effective way. With only 126 per 100,000 in prison, England and Wales is clearly not in the same league. However, with the highest prison population in Europe – the daily rate passed 70,000 in March 2002 – there can be no room for complacency, especially when reputable Sunday Times columnists suggest that we should emulate America: “perhaps the time has come to tolerate the idea of zero tolerance and build the jails to make it work” (Marrin, 2002). I offer these impressions to others who are also working to understand what it takes to keep criminal justice decent, and prison populations low