15 - Neo-Liberal Imaginaries and Gps Tracking in England and Wales

Summary

Introduction

Electronic monitoring (EM) – locational pinpointing and the remote regulation of spatial and temporal schedules – emerged in England and Wales in a small, short pilot in 1989 under a Conservative government and was rolled out nationally (after a second, larger pilot in 1996) in 1999 by the New Labour government. The pilot evaluations proved satisfactory in narrow cost-effectiveness terms, but determination to ‘modernise’ criminal justice processes, to enlist the private sector in a mixed economy of penal provision and to impose a more punitive ethos on the probation service were arguably the more significant drivers of EM use (Mair, 2005). Within a nascent neo-liberal imaginary, statebased welfare in general and probation in particular were cast by both governments as anachronistic, expensive and inefficient: delivering EM commercially, under extendable five-yearly contracts with central government, was presented as a necessary public service (and penal) reform. Legislating for EM curfews as a largely standalone measure at the pretrial, sentencing and post-release stages – rather than integrating them in probation and youth justice – justified the establishment of a separate private sector infrastructure and created a new occupational group, ‘EM officers’, in criminal justice in England and Wales.

Probation interests and liberal penal reform groups feared EM, both as a ‘privatised’ service and as a penal surveillant technology incompatible with social work, hoping it would be a passing fad because some conservative commentators themselves dismissed EM as an insufficiently punitive sanction. Probation unwisely imagined EM as an isolated penal gimmick, simply to be said yes or no to, oblivious to the momentum it gained from broader techno-cultural shifts in society. After the millennium, when digitally mediated relationships, connectivity and datification were being normalised within commerce, governance and everyday life, it became more difficult to deny EM's potential utility in ‘offender management’, but bad rather than good uses were still expected if it. The consolidation of outsourcing companies as penal stakeholders (part of a global ‘EM industry’) further increased liberal pessimism.

Mainland European probation services were gradually accommodating EM within existing supervisory frameworks, but continuing institutional unfamiliarity with it in England and Wales reinforced its ‘otherness’ to the probation service there. Government discouraged both integrated practice across the public–private divide and probation interest in EM, although some was being shown.