ABSTRACT
Mindful that a prestigious Council of Europe committee has recently begun work on an ‘ethical recommendation’ pertaining to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in prisons, probation and private companies operating in that field, this chapter maps recent and emerging developments in the relationship between digital technologies and Probation Services, in two inter-related ways. It begins with a policy-oriented account of the impending expansion of electronic monitoring in England and Wales, framed as an instance of ‘technopopulist’ politics in which disruptive, cost-efficient, expert-led innovations are being combined with a crudely punitive narrative about what should be achieved with them. This is followed by a more abstract and putatively international argument about the extent to which all core probation tasks could actually be automated using available and emergent technologies if data-driven, AI-managed forms of governance become widespread, as they might. The ideology of the fourth industrial revolution and the everyday practices of ‘surveillance capitalism’ are driving these broader developments and probation interests need to engage with their implications. It is not that nothing beneficial for probation could arise from AI, but a question of the conditions under which it could, and who decides.
