ABSTRACT
The introduction of electronic monitoring (EM) has not been equally controversial in all countries, but because it was so different in kind from pre-existing forms of community supervision, ostensibly threatening to some established probation service and penal reform interests (especially when delivered by the private sector), and easily cast as a step towards a Big Brother-style ‘surveillance society’, wariness, caution and hostility were perhaps inevitable among the more traditional penal reformers (Penal Affairs Committee 1988; Allchin 1989). EM’s initial champions, on the other hand – Tom Stacey apart (Nellis 2010a) – were often technophiles in the security and communication industries who, while not wholly unversed in the ethical implications of new technologies, knew little or nothing of what probation at its best aspired to. Initially, the core debate among politicians and criminal justice professionals was between those who saw EM simply as an unacceptably intrusive form of surveillance, strikingly at odds with the humanistic impulses of traditional probation supervision, and those who saw it as a useful, necessary and arguably cost-effective way of enhancing the credibility of community supervision. Offenders themselves have tended to appreciate it from the start (Bettsworth 1989). The more recent view, periodically articulated in the British press, that it is a rather inconsequential, easily evaded, poorly enforced form of punishment was largely unthinkable then.
