By Nancy G. La Vigne

In an attempt to reduce the high costs of illicit inmate telephone use, a high-security, computerized phone system/or Inmates was introduced on Rikers Island in 1993. A Jew months after implementation, correction officers observed that the system had the beneficial side effect of reducing fights over phone use. This paper confirms the anecdotal evidence, finding that the new phone system reduced both phone costs and inmate violence related to phone use by 50%. There was little evidence of displacement to other forms of violence. These results demonstrate that violent crime may often be precipitated by situational factors and may be prevented by reducing opportunities for disputes.

By: Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice, University of Strathclyde

Abstract

The 2025 Independent Sentencing Review (the Gauke Report) famously placed great emphasis on the use of technology in what has traditionally been called “community supervision”, to provide a way out of the capacity crisis in England and Wales’ prisons. In favours a significant expansion of electronic monitoring (EM) and markedly more punitive forms of remote regulation – dubbed “prison outside prison” in press releases. It further encourages the use of emerging forms of AI to make monitoring and supervision more efficient. In this, the Review was largely elaborating the Ministry of Justice’s own emerging view of the penal future. Its call for EM to be more integrated with the Probation Service, may have gone further, but the Review’s vision of the future Probation Service is of a punitive-surveillant agency with a rather ambiguous commitment to rehabilitation. Whether this imagined future is realised remains to be seen.