ABSTRACT
Given their ubiquity in everyday life there is a certain inevitability that smartphones would be co-opted for penal purposes, and adopted by community corrections agencies in the US. They are commercially marketed as a less intrusive form of electronic monitoring (EM) than Radio-Rrequency (RF) curfews and Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, and pitched as more suitable for monitoring lower risk offenders – a hitherto untapped market – than traditional forms of EM have routinely been used for. As versatile communication and tracking devices smartphones generate much more data about offenders lives and habits than traditional forms of EM and in that sense are consistent with tentative moves to utilise Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the management of offender populations. Meanwhile, community corrections have begun addressing the criminological criticism of ‘mass supervision’ – the vast overuse of probation on lower risk offenders from largely poor communities. Right-wing political interests, long hostile to the over-reach of statutory community corrections agencies, like this agenda. Whilst content to remove low-risk offenders from the formal purview of probation they are keen to use smartphones to monitor these offenders instead, devoid of the due process considerations that more formal interventions would once have required.
