ABSTRACT
Electronic monitoring (EM) emerged in Belgium in 1998 as a local pilot scheme in a Brussels prison in the context of the preparation of early release of prisoners serving a maximum prison sentence of 18 months. In 2000, with very limited experience of its implementation, and without any evidence of its potential effects or benefits, the minister of justice decided on a nation-wide implementation. This decision was taken without either any legal provision for the regulation of EM or any discussions in Parliament on the desirability of this novelty. EM was thus quietly smuggled into the Belgian correctional system. Since then, several proposals and attempts to extend the use of EM to other phases of the criminal justice system have been made, but in Belgium to date EM is still used solely as a way of serving a prison sentence. Nevertheless, despite a slow start, the use of EM has increased rapidly since 2006. In the first part of 2010 about 1,000 prisoners were subject to EM in Belgium.
