ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 by Mike Nellis is mainly about community sanctions which he says are born and shaped by wider social (political, economic and cultural) circumstances. Although the humanistic ethos probation defined them for most of the twentieth century they do not have a constant character. Historically, they have been delivered directly by state agencies, sometimes subcontracted to voluntary organisations. The advent and expansion of electronic monitoring (EM) in the late twentieth century complicated this, particularly in England and Wales. Not only was the remote monitoring of offender’s presence in their own homes devoid of the humanist and relational character of probation, the then Conservative government wanted it delivered by a separate commercial body. This set up lasting antagonisms between the Probation Service and EM, which intensified as the precepts of neoliberalism eroded the social democratic foundations on which the post-war Probation Service had been built, and increasingly infused digital technology into all aspects of business, governance and everyday life. Under the Conservative-led coalition government between 2010–2015 a concerted effort was made to downgrade probation (by privatising most of it) and upgrading EM (by switching to large-scale GPS tracking). Neither of these ill-conceived developments proved viable, but a return to a renationalised Probation Service does not guarantee a return to its earlier character, and it seems reasonable to think that the supervisory relationships within future community sanctions will be mediated by technology, possibly using smartphones, which are being specifically reconfigured as a versatile new form of EM.
