ABSTRACT

Electronically monitored (EM) punishment developed as a response to the problem of prison overcrowding as well as the enhanced focus placed upon re-introducing market values to the criminal justice sector and incorporating advances in information and communication technological (ICT) infrastructures to establish a new mode of crime control. The preference for market delivery of previously ‘public’ goods and services, initially described as ‘privatization’, became a feature of governmental projects in the (mainly) English-speaking countries that favoured neoliberal political and economic reforms during the 1980s and 1990s and enabled EM entrepreneurs in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand to experiment with this new criminal justice tool. Thus, the evolution of EM as a penal innovation is best understood as an adjunct to broader developments in the commercial crime control market that laid its roots in the United States after the Second World War. This market, grounded in private security, benefited from growth spurts provided by the end of the Cold War, the liberalization of economic markets and rising concern about uncontrolled migration, global crime and international terrorism, to develop into a global market in commercial crime control and techno-corrections.