The strategic failure of electronic monitoring in Scotland

Abstract

It is the contention of this chapter that the electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders in Scotland, introduced nationwide in 2002, has been seriously underused and that its potential for contributing strategically to a reduction in the use of short custodial sentences has not been realised, not as well as in Scandinavia, for example, where EM has always been formally embedded in the work of probation services. Scotland’s strongly ‘penal-welfarist’ discourse in criminal justice and a marked affinity for ‘mentoring’ over ‘monitoring’, has arguably made its social work agencies, among others, very sceptical of surveillance technology like EM. Even more crucially, its delivery by a private sector agency, contracted to central government (in 2015 it was G4S), has invited political disdain and served to marginalise its use still further (Nellis, 2014c). Imaginative debate on how the remote regulation of spatial and temporal sche-dules (the distinct form of control afforded by EM) can be used creatively to reduce prison use and to assist desistance and rehabilitation has been singularly lacking in all major reports on Scotland’s penal problems; there has been a clear sense that solutions can be achieved without any significant strategic use of it. Sheriffs have been rather variable in their use of EM, as with so many other forms of community supervision, and as geographical inconsistency in sentencing is not commonly perceived as a problem in Scotland, there are no easy judicial or political remedies for this. Nonetheless, there have been tentative signs of attitudinal changes in somequarters, towards both existing radio frequency (RF) EM, currently used for curfews on both adult and young offenders, and Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite tracking, used for monitoring movement, whose introduction was canvassed in a Scottish Government (2013) consultation. The official response (Scottish Government, 2014b) has been cautious in the extreme, asserting a welcome degree of leadershipon the issue, but essentially re-affirming the incrementalism that has led to EM’s underuse in the past and avoiding, again, the two key strategic challenges: how to better integrate EM into criminal justice social work and how to use EM to effect reductions in the use of short custodial sentences.