ABSTRACT
The emergence in the UK of a new, surveillant, modality of control in community supervision is vividly demonstrated by the existence of three private-sector monitoring centres, in Salford, Norwich and Swindon respectively, whose staff know remotely and in real-time whether or not an offender is complying with a curfew, made to a specified location, anywhere in England and Wales. There is a fourth centre in Glasgow, covering the whole of Scotland. These centres receive and record relayed signals from ankle tags worn by offenders, who must remain within close proximity of transmitters attached, for the duration of their court-ordered curfew, to their home telephones. ‘Electronic monitoring’ (henceforth ‘EM’) has to date mostly used radio-frequency (r/f) telephony to confirm or deny location, but newer technologies can be encompassed by the term, and are already being experimented with. Voice verification and other biometric forms of identity authentication can be used to monitor presence at several locations, rather than just one. Various global positioning systems (GPS), some using satellites, go beyond specific location monitoring to track offenders’ movements and/or deny access to specified exclusion zones. While being mostly concerned with EM-based curfews, this chapter will also allude to these new developments.
