ABSTRACT
This chapter presents case studies; including global positioning system (GPS) tracking, lie detection technology, and pharmacological interventions, all of which have been deployed to address violent and sexual offending. From the 1990s, well into the new millennium, sex offenders against children were presented by policymakers as the ideal target group for GPS tracking at the end of – hardly ever as an alternative to – a custodial sentence. Ethical debates using medical treatments with sex offenders may have wider implications for pharmacological interventions in criminal conduct. Many technological fixes for violent and sexual offenders have been mooted and tried, some of which have been abandoned for a mix of empirical and normative reasons, but the perceived need for them, the confidence that technical solutions must exist, has intensified. New neurological developments, themselves facilitated by new technologies, are pointing up new techniques, which have entered the domain of popular culture, and indeed generated some commercial enterprises.
