ABSTRACT
The UK likes to see itself as a leader in penal policy and practice; it is, for example, proud to claim its importance as the originator of probation (despite the rather more accurate claims of the United States, or in Europe, the Netherlands) and it is notable that as Eastern Bloc countries moved to Westernize themselves after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of these countries followed the advice of academics and probation officers from England and Wales about how to modernize their probation services (despite the often retrograde managerial and cultural changes ‘our’ Probation Service was undergoing from 1991 onwards). Another development where England and Wales led the way for Europe was in the piloting of electronic monitoring (EM) as a criminal justice tool, although it went about it in ways which reflected the government of the day’s particular sense of penal crisis, and their preferred solutions, which others in mainland Europe neither shared nor fully wished to emulate. This chapter will focus on the origins and development of EM in England and Wales, concentrating particularly on research and policy, and touch more briefly on its later development in Scotland, which was slightly different.
