ABSTRACT
It is well known that electronic monitoring (EM) originated in the United States, but a definitive account of its emergence and developmental trajectory there has yet to be written, and there is no clear consensus as to what the theoretical and empirical parameters of such a narrative would be. There is a vast US literature on EM, either policy-based (published by or on behalf of the National Institute for Justice) or practice-based (published predominantly in Federal Probation and the Journal of Offender Monitoring). Such evaluative literature as there is leaves a lot to be desired, methodologically and substantively (see Renzema, this volume) and few academic commentators believe that EM’s growth has been informed by significant evidence of its effectiveness. Only a rather small amount of critical literature has sought to understand the social and political context in which EM appeared, and even someone as attuned to the nuances of penal innovation as David Garland (2000) pays it little heed. Ball et al. (1988) did the foundation work on EM’s criminological significance in the United States, but even they played down the technological changes which made EM possible, concentrating more on the way it had revived the ‘ancient’ penalty of house arrest. No single work has yet synthesized and expanded on this early critical literature, or embedded it in an adequate and up-to-date understanding of socio-technical developments. Corbett and Marx’s (1992) much-cited article on ‘emerging technofallacies in the electronic monitoring movement’ signposted the way, but even Marx’s (2007) own recent observations on ‘the engineering of social control’ have little specific to say on EM.
