Post-script: Guide, guard and glue – Electronic monitoring and penal supervision
| Author | Fergus McNeill |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2066220317700544 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/2066220317700544
European Journal of Probation
2017, Vol. 9(1) 103 –107
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2066220317700544
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejp
Post-script: Guide, guard and
glue – Electronic monitoring
and penal supervision
Fergus McNeill
University of Glasgow, UK
Introduction
This issue of the European Journal of Probation provides us with contemporary, consid-
ered and thoughtful analyses of the development of electronic monitoring (EM) in the
context of penal sanctions and measures in five jurisdictions: Australia, Belgium,
Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland. The guest editor of this special issue – Professor
Kristel Beyens – deserves great credit for pulling together such an interesting and impor-
tant collection of papers. She has asked me – as someone deeply interested in penal
supervision but to some extent detached from debates about EM – to offer some closing
reflections. In what follows, I try to do that, not through any attempt to synthesise the
analyses of these excellent papers, but rather simply by sharing the thoughts and ques-
tions they provoked in this reader.
Perhaps the obvious place to start is with my ‘detachment’ hitherto from EM. Despite
the encouragement of wiser colleagues (like Mike Nellis and Kristel Beyens) to engage
more with EM in my work on supervision, I have always been hesitant. On the one hand,
like everyone else, I find it impossible to dispute the important influence of technologies
on social (and therefore penal) policies and practices – and on the evolution of social life
and social control in late-modernity. To make this case, I need only examine the way that
my own life has been progressively re-framed by new technologies. My smartphone is
my guide and my guard – and the glue that, in one sense, fixes together my social and
personal relations. In fact, this single handheld device digitally mediates most of my
social relations. It is not that I do not have an ‘analogue life’ where I meet and relate to
‘real’ people in the flesh; rather, it is that even those interactions are planned, ordered and
facilitated by that device. So, I shudder at the fearful prospect of the loss of my smart-
phone, even if I also sometimes resent its omnipresence and fear its omniscience: Better
than any person perhaps, it knows (and records) my plans, my contacts, my movements,
my curiosities, my purchases, my networks, and so forth. Yes, I can silence its tones and
alerts, but even then I hover around it – curious as to the digital ‘action’ that I might be
missing. And the digital world does seem to be where most of the action is.
Even so, when it comes to thinking about penal supervision, perhaps like many proba-
tion academics and practitioners of my generation (or older), the centrality of human-
human interactions and relationships has been drilled into me, both in my professional
700544EJP0010.1177/2066220317700544<italic>European Journal of Probation</italic>McNeill
2017
Article
To continue reading
Request your trial