Portable prisons: Electronic monitoring and the creation of carceral territory By J. Gacek, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. 2022. pp. 186. £24.99 (pbk). ISBN: 9780228008286

Abstract

I think the theoretical framework developed in this monograph to comprehend the nature of electronically monitoring (EM) offenders as a penal measure is groundbreaking and important, if not necessarily definitive. I do not, however, find the application of the framework to the actual use of EM-curfews in the specific jurisdiction of Scotland, where the author undertook his original PhD research, entirely convincing. This does not detract from the book, because the cluster of concepts which guide Portable prisons can be appraised separately from their application to Scotland.

Except for a limitation which was annoyingly forced on him by the Scottish Government – he was not allowed to interview people serving court-ordered time in the community on EM, only those who had been breached and returned to prison (for whom EM had notionally ‘failed’), Gacek's book is a model of how to study EM in a single jurisdiction. The polemical first chapter seeks first to ‘unsettle’ (p.4) readers about the extent to which ‘carceral’ (or as some might call them, ‘surveillant’) practices outside prison increasingly pervade everyday lives in ‘Western, liberal democracies’. It also rejects the legitimacy of using (any or all?) remote sensing-systems and databases to track and monitor peoples’ mobility. This flags up concerns that the concluding chapter revisits, about developing resistance to present and future carceral campaigns.

The second chapter elaborates Gacek's key explanatory/descriptive concept of ‘carceral territory’. It shows how spaces that might otherwise be called places, neighbourhoods and communities are structured by remote monitoring technologies and an associated set of legally and judicially-imposed regulations into a mode of governing the spatial and temporal schedules of designated offenders. ‘Carceral territory’ certainly illuminates the granular way in which satellite tracking operates to monitor the trails, traces and locations of mobile offenders 24/7, and – I agree – is not entirely without application to the simpler home detention models which curfew people in their own homes for twelve hours per day, mostly overnight. Since EM-curfews’ introduction in the late 1990s, Scotland – unlike many other jurisdictions – has done no more than toy with introducing more complex tracking systems. It has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe, but its use of EM remains among the least territorially restrictive available, and unless one is in the business of imposing a priori definitions, I would hesitate to call its practice here ‘carceral’.

Portable prisons then provides two empirical chapters on the institutions and actors that enable and sustain the production of carceral territory on a 24/7 basis, one focused on the privatised monitoring centre run by G4S that oversees EM across the whole country, the other on the field monitoring officers who drive around Scotland each day installing sensors in offenders’ homes and tags on their ankles, as and when courts and prisons order them. In the monitoring centre Gacek observes and speaks with staff at their screens, extending and tailoring insights into the operation of EM from the ‘work of watching’ developed in studies of CCTV control rooms. In the ‘ride-alongs’ in the field officers’ cars he listens attentively to the meanings they give to their work, notes their interactions with householders and pays particular attention to the way they ‘calibrate carcerality’ by fine tuning the range of the ‘home monitoring unit’ to the internal spaces and boundaries of a particular home. I know Scotland's monitoring centre well and have also done the occasional ride-along, and Gacek, who is a very able noticer of things, etches this work indelibly into the penological imagination.

His final substantive chapter contains verbatim material from his interviews with people (mostly men, reflecting the gender distribution of EM's use) imprisoned for breaching their EM conditions. This not only adds to existing offender perspectives on EM, it builds on existing literature and stands out. It covers the prisoner's experiences of being on EM, the stresses and strains imposed on their loved ones, co-resident or otherwise, and it recognises the stigma of tag-wearing and the manœuvres required to disguise it from prying others. It also covers the impact of their return to prison after EM. Gacek registers his not being allowed to interview people actually serving time on EM as a methodological flaw, but this does not fundamentally devalue or weaken his study. True, if he had interviewed respondents ‘in that moment’ he might have found some of them – and especially their loved ones – more agreeable about the experience and the opportunity. But an attentive and sceptical reading of at least some of his own prisoner-derived quotes suggests that while his respondents had indeed found half-day EM curfews territorially restrictive, and definitely punitive, the term ‘carceral’ just does not seem apt for what they were feeling and experiencing about the freedoms that remained to them. The conclusion dubiously drawn from this data, namely that ‘EM is not actually “better” than prison, it is just a different form of prison’ (p.121) is something Gacek, and carceral geography in general, is reluctant to unpack.

Globally, some existing forms of EM, the dignity-denying, 24/7 home confinement enforced by satellite tracking in the USA, dubbed ‘e-carceration’, as well as malign visions of electro-shock ‘technological incarceration’ are too horrendously similar to prison (or worse) to quibble over terminology. But in my own work on EM I avoided thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments which imply that any use of EM in any form would lead inexorably down the line to the worst applications of it, and must therefore always be opposed in its earliest stages. This is ‘socio-technical determinism’, if not straightforward ‘technological determinism’ and it is something carceral geographers should take more care to avoid by acknowledging humanly-relevant variations in the intensity of carcerality or, perhaps better still, admitting that some penal measures are best called ‘carceral’ and others best left as ‘surveillant’, although they are, of course, never not related.

Gacek does make use of conceptual work on the variable ‘tightness’ of EM regimes (Hucklesby, Beyens & Boone, 2020), but is not interested in its (liberal) implications for severity and proportionality, possibly because (using Foucault's distinction) it is the ‘diffuse’, as opposed to ‘compact’ forms of carcerality that unsettles him more. But, credit where it is due, it is because there is ample evidence elsewhere that through political-commercial pressures mild and relatively civilised forms of EM are being remorselessly upgraded into something intrusive and cruel that Gacek's mapping of ‘carceral territory’ will have to be taken account of in all future studies of EM.

But maybe not so much in Scotland, yet? Since Gacek completed his own research, a second excellent PhD has been completed on EM here (Casey, 2021). It uses some similar empirical methods (including ride-alongs) and draws similar conclusions about EM-curfews’ limited relevance to what offenders with bleak lives in marginal communities really need, and whose privatised administration costs money perhaps better spent on more constructive interventions, but without using the idioms of carceral geography. This suggests that Portable prisons may be using a reified, overdetermined idea of ‘the carceral’ which, while undeniably productive of insights, need not be foundational to critical studies of EM, least of all Scotland's particular use of it. But it has a place.

Nonetheless, I think Gacek's over-reliance on the concept creates unnecessary difficulties in his final chapter on resisting carcerality in all its forms, everywhere. He makes an impeccable academic-activist case for ‘public education [which] has the potential to ameliorate suffering’ (p.145). In my experience of doing that, such projects only work when they unfold dialogically. The ultra-abstract, academic term ‘carceral’ has limited cachet in working-class communities who want something done about ongoing harmful behaviour, although it may well have more with people, and their loved ones, who have themselves experienced illegitimate state/penal power. The thing is, both constituencies warrant a place in any dialogue with activists, and in my own experience in Scotland neither working-class communities nor monitored individuals systematically regard EM-curfews as wholly illegitimate, no different from prison nor an intolerable penal experience, given the alternative that courts present to them. ‘The carceral’ in this dialogical context is more of a hard sell than a hard cell. There are better vernacular languages for resisting EM on the ground.

My antipathy to reified uses of carcerality was already in the public domain and Gacek ‘respectfully diverges from’ (p.6) it at the outset. I still think my surveillance-derived concept of ‘coercive connectivity’ is more apt than his carceral-derived term ‘portable prisons’ as an analytical characterisation of EM in general. Time will tell. It is nonetheless an honour to have one's work engaged with by a scholar as outstanding as James Gacek; he has written a necessary book about EM, which advances the arguments we undoubtedly need to have about it.