Electronic Monitoring and Probation Practice

Abstract

Probation services have, perhaps understandably, had a largely ambivalent relationship to electronic monitoring (EM) technology, and while recent years have seen, around the world, a rapprochement between the two—sometimes convivial, sometimes uneasy, based on a despondent (or merely pragmatic) sense that, no matter what, EM is not going away—it would be unwise to assume that no cause for concern remains about the likely trajectory and impact of this surveillance technology (Nellis et al. 2012). English chief probation officer Whitfield (1997, 2001) and the sequence of CEP EM conferences that began in 1998 made a concerted bid to promote an integrated vision of EM, embedding it within probation programmes to support rehabilitative ends, and have undoubtedly influenced EM’s development for the better in Europe (Nellis 2014a). The Council of Europe’s (2014) subsequent Recommendation (instigated by the CEP) set out a human rights framework for implementing EM—recognising that it had appeal to prison services and police forces as well as probation services—and was premised on the idea that without dynamic regulation there could obviously be bad and unduly extensive uses of EM, possibly fuelled by commercial interests. The overall political, economic and cultural context in which EM has gained prominence and momentum as a penal measure could undoubtedly make it a ‘disruptive technology’, and perhaps even a ‘transformational technology’ in respect of contemporary probation services—more so, perhaps, than one which can easily and permanently be subordinated to existing probation ideals and practices.