Home      Login

Abstract: 

Is infatuation with all things “digital” distorting justice policy in the U.K.? That is the possibility raised by Mike Nellis in this in-depth examination of the current state of Electronic Monitoring in Britain. The Ministry of Justice has begun dismantling the Probation Service as a state-based profession while expanding its already large electronic monitoring program, which is managed primarily by private firms. In his closing address at a conference on the future of public services in Britain (sponsored by, among other tech firms, the American aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed-Martin), Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, argued that public services—routine transactions between government and citizens—should and would become “digital by default” (or “digital first”). All available evidence showed, he said, that, in any given context, on any given scale, face-to-face encounters, paper exchanges and telephone calls were more expensive and less efficient than online/digital contact. This article contends that the government’s intended transformative upgrade of EM for offenders was an expression of both the “digital by default” agenda and of an ideology of “commercial common sense,” and that the primary case for its use is now as likely to be made by an appeal to ordinary commercial reasons as much as distinctly penal objectives and principles.

Keywords: EM in England and Scotland; privatization; “digital first”

Affiliations:  1: Journal Editor.