By Paul H. Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman

The decarceration movement enjoys enthusiastic support from many academics and activists who point out imprisonment’s failure to rehabilitate and its potential criminogenic effects. At the same time, many fiscal conservatives and taxpayer groups are critical of imprisonment’s high costs and supportive of finding cheaper alternatives. Yet, despite this widespread support, the decarceration movement has made little real progress at getting offenders out of prison, in large part because community views, and thus political officials, are strongly committed to the importance of doing justice – giving offenders the punishment they deserve – and decarceration is commonly seen as inconsistent with that nonnegotiable principle. Indeed, almost no one in the decarceration movement has attempted to formulate a large-scale decarceration plan that still provides for what the community would see as just punishment.

In this Article, we offer just such a plan by demonstrating that it is entirely possible to avoid the incarceration of most offenders through utilizing non-incarcerative sanctions that can carry a total punitive effect comparable to physical prison. New technologies allow for imposing “electronic prison” sentences where authorities can monitor, control, and punish offenders in a cheaper and less damaging way than physical prison while still doing justice. Further, the monitoring conditions provided in electronic prison allow for the imposition of a wide array of other non-incarcerative sanctions that were previously difficult or impossible to enforce. Even while it justly punishes, electronic prison can dramatically increase an offender’s opportunities for training, treatment, education, and rehabilitation while avoiding the problems of unsupported families, socialization to criminality, and problematic reentry after physical incarceration. And, from a public safety standpoint, electronic prison can reduce recidivism by eliminating the criminogenic effect of incarceration and also provides longer-term monitoring of offenders than an equivalently punitive shorter term of physical imprisonment. Of course, one can imagine a variety of objections to an electronic prison system, ranging from claims it violates an offender’s rights to fears it may widen the net of carceral control. The Article provides a response to each.

Electronic prison is one of those rare policy proposals that should garner support from across the political spectrum due to effectively addressing the complaints against America’s incarceration system lodged by voices on the left, right, and center. Whether one’s primary concern is decarcerating prisoners and providing offenders with needed treatment, training, counseling, and education, or one’s concern is reducing crime, imposing deserved punishment, or simply reducing government expenditures, implementing an electronic prison system would provide a dramatic improvement over America’s current incarceration policies.

Written April 2024. U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-20,

By Varun Bhadha, Matthew Clauson, Jeanmarie Elican, Fatima Khan, Kendall Lawrenz, Brooke Pemberton, Rebecca Ringler, Jordan Schaer, Mikayla Sherman, and Sarah Wohlsdorf

The use of surveillance technology to tag and track people on pretrial release, probation and parole is on the rise. The COVID-19 crisis in prisons and jails, bail reform efforts and bipartisan support for curbing mass incarceration accelerated interest in purported alternatives to incarceration. As a result, the use electronic monitoring devices, including GPS-equipped ankle monitors, went up dramatically. Thanks to the leadership of community organizers and advocates, the harmful and racialized nature of this type of carceral surveillance has been exposed. This report seeks to add to those efforts by examining the specific policies, procedures, contracts and rules that govern the use of electronic monitoring of people on probation, parole and pretrial release.4 Drawing on over 247 records from 101 agencies across 44 states and the District of Columbia, this report focuses on the operation of electronic monitoring and reveals the degree to which monitoring impacts all aspects of everyday life and undermines the ability of people to survive and thrive. In particular, this report focuses on the specific rules and policies governing people on monitors and how they restrict movement, limit privacy, undermine family and social relationships, jeopardize financial security and result in repeated loss of freedom….

Washington DC: George Washington University Law School, 2021. 54p.

By Carl Berry.

Electronic monitoring, (EM), or ‘tagging’, is a relatively recent but increasingly used sentencing measure employed by criminal justice agencies across the globe. Dispensed for a range of criminal offences, it typically functions by enabling the construction of a curfew intended to keep users in a designated place for a period of time. Despite its widespread usage, tagging is an under researched and controversial penal sanction beset with numerous difficulties that has garnered as much criticism as praise. The emergence of EM accompanies concerns about increasing uses of surveillance and control within society, yet has been often faulted for failing to practically function. As new technologies transform the criminal justice landscape, recent theoretical perspectives have attempted to theorise measures like EM within criminology. Foremost amongst these positions, actor network theory (or ANT), is a constructivist approach that advocates using observational methods, which, besides challenging many long standing social scientific ideas, controversially contends that material objects have agency and lead ‘fluid lives’. Asserting further that objects are entangled with humans in ‘assemblages of actors’, the position attempts to demonstrate how dynamic interactions within these ‘heterogeneous networks’ lead to successful social ordering. Importantly, it urges researchers to ‘describe’ these ‘hybridised socio-technical systems’ while making as few presumptions as possible; to outline how (or if) they accomplish this. This PhD thesis undertakes an ethnographic investigation of tagging from the position of offenders subject to a range of EM sentences in a location in England dubbed ‘EM City’, and uses a modified version of ANT alongside allied approaches such as postphenomenology. It borrows the administrative criminological concepts of ‘compliance’ and ‘desistance’, to serve as metrics for assessing how tagging leads outcomes of programme completion and criminal de-escalation to sometimes emerge. Additionally, it attempts to understand how variable ‘affects’ (or ‘pains’) associated with its restrictions arise from a somewhat more critical criminological position; however, these are expanded to account for positive, or neutral/ambivalent reactions. The experiences of ‘supporting actors’ who assist EM users are also investigated, before finally re-joining a selection of users post-sentence. It is demonstrated that tagging often becomes an onerous penalty that is sometimes implicated in attaining desired outcomes, but that it also routinely features prohibited activity: led by a range of factors within the ‘chaos’ of many offenders’ lives. The device-system of EM is further asserted to form a ‘carceral actant-ensemble’, which, when ‘bound’ to it, leads ‘hybrid-users’ (or ‘hosts’) to acquire their range of experiences. Ultimately, however, whether tagging derives punitive affects or achieves success in maintaining curfews and reducing offending, is dependent on its enrolment of pre-existing, yet shifting, wider associations within the lives of users. This temporary ‘penal assemblage’ is, additionally, shown to be intersected further by several socio-technical issues: offender support, poverty, ethnicity, and gender, which become enrolled through it.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2021. 378p.