ABSTRACT
Since its inception in the 1980s, the electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders has been rationalised and presented by government to the British public as something that is both more punitive and controlling than traditional community penalties, and increases public protection in the sense of reducing crime and preventing victimisation, or revictimisation. Other European countries, particularly Sweden, have been more concerned to portray EM as a controlling adjunct to rehabilitation, highlighting its reintegrative rather than its punitive aspect, but the assumption that public protection will be enhanced by EM remains much the same. In the case of EM curfews (the commonest form of EM), where offenders are required to stay in their own homes (or other designated place such as a hostel) for a period of weeks or months, public protection is supposedly achieved by the simple fact of punitive sequestration – keeping offenders off the streets, especially at night. An element of deterrence in the longer term may also be assumed, on the grounds that offenders, having once experienced it, may wish to avoid such an ostensibly onerous sentence in the future. While no directly rehabilitative effect can be attributed to EM itself – it does not seek to change attitudes or behaviour or to reform character – Hucklesby (2008, 2009) has shown that periods of enforced domestic confinement can have a ‘bad-habit breaking’ effect on some offenders, and in that sense can contribute to desistance. Nonetheless, worldwide – EM is now used in approximately 30 countries – there is precious little evidence that it is as good at crime reduction/public protection as governments initially hoped it would be (Renzema and MayoWilson 2005). This is partly because, as Renzema and Mayo-Wilson rightly claim, there have been too few methodologically sound studies of EM, but also because the use of it, and political expectations of it, have all too often been ill thought out.
