ABSTRACT

In England and Wales, and Scotland, and indeed around the world since the 1990s, electronically monitored (EM) curfews have largely been used for punitive and controlling (rather than rehabilitative) purposes, and as such have become a commonplace feature of community supervision, mostly as a stand-alone sentence, occasionally as a requirement in a multi-component sentencing package and as an early release from prison mechanism (the Home Detention Curfew scheme). They have also been used as a condition of bail and of post-release licences, including parole; as a component of intensive supervision schemes for young offenders; as a means of checking the movements of asylum seekers, 2 and sometimes as an element in the handful of control orders imposed on terrorist suspects (Nellis 2004, 2007; Mair 2005). British governments have remained committed to EM despite the periodic tarnishing of its image in the media, where ‘tagging’ has come to be seen as a rather lenient penalty compared to the tough ‘punishment in the community’ that it was officially conceived and projected as in 1989/90, when it was first piloted, and even in 1999 when it first became a nationally available measure. A total of 580,000 offenders have been tagged since then and the scandals that have unfairly come to define its public image relate to only a tiny handful of cases.