Decrypting the gaze of electronic monitoring (EM): A comparative book review of Daems’ Electronic monitoring and Gacek's Portable prisons

Abstract

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a highly recognisable yet contested penal sanction that employs surveillance and spatial temporal control to enforce curfews. Due to EM’s rapidly transforming and expanding inter-jurisdictional implementation, attempts at understanding this penal measure have often been outpaced by a need to keep up with simple information (Hucklesby & Holdsworth, 2016). Dramatic technological innovations have recently changed EM’s physical equipment and monitoring systems; however, concerns about how many, who and in what stage of the justice process, have taken precedent. Agencies commission official research seeking evaluations of whether EM works, while more penetrating questions about its objectives are left unanswered. Although very beneficial insights, deploying concepts such as telematics and e-topia have been made by luminaries like Mike Nellis (2017), sustained theoretical examinations of EM, until recently, have been rare. Nevertheless, such theoretical analyses are important: How can we ask whether EMworks, when (as is particularly the case in my jurisdiction, England and Wales) its penal objectives are unclear from a practical, let alone philosophical, perspective? Furthermore, if those objectives were explicitly formulated, we could then critically evaluate whether their purported aims match their actual use. Two recent books, Tom Daems’ Electronic monitoring: Tagging offenders in an age of surveillance (2020) and James Gacek’s Portable prisons: Electronic monitoring and the creation Book Review