From offender to victim-oriented monitoring: a comparative analysis of the emergence of electronic monitoring systems in Argentina and England and Wales

Abstract

The increasingly psychological terrain of crime and disorder management has had a transformative impact upon the use of electronic monitoring technologies. Surveillance technologies such as electronic monitoring - EM, biometrics, and video surveillance have flourished in commercial environments that market the benefits of asocial technologies in managing disorderly behavior and which, despite often chimerical crime prevention promises, appeal to the ontologically insecure social imagination. The growth of EM in criminal justice has subsequently taken place despite, at best, equivocal evidence that it protects the public and reduces recidivism. Innovative developments in Portugal, Argentina and the United States have re-imagined EM technologies as more personalized devices that can support victims rather than control offenders. These developments represent a re-conceptualization of the use of the technology beyond the neoliberal prism of rational choice theories and offender-oriented thinking that influenced first generation thinking about EM. This paper identifies the socio-political influences that helped conceptualize first generation thinking about EM as, firstly, a community sentence and latterly, as a technique of urban security. The paper reviews attempts to theorize the role and function of EM surveillance technologies within and beyond criminal justice and explores the contribution of victimological perspectives to the use of EM 2.0.

The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in Context: From Policy to Political Logics

“…The main point here was the "'elective affinity' between the highly individuated focus of EM, and its emergence as an 'industry,' and processes of 'neoliberalization' in Europe [represented by] free (or quasi-) markets as policy instruments, the denigration (and contracting-out) of public services and reduction of public expenditure" (Nellis 2014a: 505). Similarly, Paterson (2008Paterson ( , 2015 argued that EM embodies the neoliberal ethos because it combines market competition, privatized institutions and sub-contracted, at-a-distance forms of social control within a framework of increasing emphasis on reducing the costs of crime control. Such useful engagements with EM policy and politics consist mainly of micro-analyses of the transactions between local political actors and policy networks.…”

“…The overarching aim is to contribute toward a "thick" understanding of EM, challenging the interpretation of this measure as a "mere" neoliberal penal innovation (Feeley and Simon 1992;Garland 2001;Nellis 2014a;Nellis and Bungerfeldt 2013;Paterson 2008Paterson , 2015. In pursuing this objective, this article enriches the debate around the present and the future of EM, while providing material for contesting its political effects.…”

Tagging re-booted! Imagining the potential of victim-oriented electronic monitoring

“…The potential of EM as a tool to address re-offending rates emerged in the US during the 1990s and led to policy innovations that placed increased emphasis upon victims' interests. Victim-oriented electronic monitoring emerged out of these shifts, both through the introduction of bi-lateral monitoring which involved surveillance of both offenders and victims and exclusion orders which emphasised victim protection as the primary aim of the programme (Paterson and Clamp, 2015;Paterson, 2016). The innovative conceptualisation of the electronic monitoring of offenders was initially imagined by those outside of the penal field (Lilly, 1996) EM programs attempted to restrict the movement of offenders to their own domestic space at specified points of the day or night through the use of radio frequency (RF) technologies that would report absences from an agreed place to a central monitoring centre.…”

“…There is a need to nurture and resource new agents of social development but the victimological perspective by the local state can work without being co-opted by state-centred offender-orientations (Paterson, 2016).…”

“…Conversely, think tanks such as Reform (see Lockhart-Mirams et al 2015) and Policy Exchange have been historically influential in shaping the architecture of criminal justice even though their assumptions about EM programmes marginalise demands for security that emerge out of these same local communities (Manning 2010;Paterson 2016). The few studies that exist of the experience of being made subject to EM-based restrictions highlight the potential for curfews to move offending from the public sphere to the private sphere, to exacerbate tensions in domestic spaces (Paterson, 2007b) and to place added pressure on the friends and families of those subject to EM (Vanhaelemeesch and Vander Beken, 2014).…”