Upgrading electronic monitoring, downgrading probation: Reconfiguring ‘offender management’ in England and Wales
| Author | Mike Nellis |
| DOI | 10.1177/2066220314540572 |
| Published date | 01 August 2014 |
| Date | 01 August 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Probation
2014, Vol. 6(2) 169 –191
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/2066220314540572
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Upgrading electronic
monitoring, downgrading
probation: Reconfiguring
‘offender management’ in
England and Wales
Mike Nellis
University of Strathclyde, UK
Abstract
England and Wales is currently privatizing most of its Probation Service and simultaneously
planning to create the largest and most advanced electronic monitoring (EM) scheme in
the world, using combined GPS tracking and radio frequency technology. Downgrading
one, upgrading the other. Using a mix of published and unpublished sources, discussions
with some key players in these developments, (and a ‘critical policy analysis’ perspective),
this article begins by documenting the post-2010 development of GPS tracking, and the
emergence of strong police support for its large-scale use. It notes the role of a right-
wing think tank, Policy Exchange, in promoting the view that the GPS-based tracking of
offenders’ movements is an intrinsically superior form of ‘electronic monitoring’ that
should fully replace the discredited but still prevailing radio frequency EM, which can
only restrict people to a single location. In the course of devising a third contract with
commercial organizations to deliver EM, it transpired that the incumbent providers
had been systematically overcharging the government for their services. Although a
public scandal, and a series of official enquires – summarized here – resulted from this,
the general momentum behind the outsourcing of penal interventions has not been
slowed: the Conservative-led Coalition government is pursuing a relentlessly neoliberal
agenda, driven far more by financial imperatives and technological preferences than
anything that makes proper penal sense. The creation of a large, advanced GPS-based
EM programme may not in fact work out in practice, but the government’s readiness
to envision it shows where untrammelled neoliberalism points in respect of ‘offender
management’ techniques. Although England and Wales have always been anomalous in
their fully privatized delivery of EM, its preparedness to invest massively in GPS tracking
Corresponding author:
Mike Nellis, Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice, University of Strathclyde, School of
Law, Graham Hills Building Level 7, 50 George Street, Glasgow G1 1QE, UK.
Email: mike.nellis@strath.ac.uk
540572EJP0010.1177/2066220314540572European Journal of ProbationNellis
2014
Article
170 European Journal of Probation 6(2)
and to simultaneously sacrifice the state-based Probation Service should serve to warn
other European services of the penal challenges that neoliberalism may present them
with.
Keywords
Electronic monitoring, GPS tracking, privatization, police, Transforming Rehabilitation
Introduction
Under the Coalition Government – dominated by a neoliberally-inclined Conservative
Party, but in partnership with the notionally left-of-centre Liberal Democrats – which
came to power in Britain in May 2010, major changes in the community supervision of
offenders are underway in England and Wales. Chief among these are the imminent abo-
lition of Probation as a statutory public service (except for the 30% of high risk offend-
ers), and its replacement by Community Rehabilitation Companies made up of consortia
of private and voluntary organizations, who will purchase 21 regional ‘contract package
areas’ from the government, up to a maximum of six each. In addition, under the new
contract for electronic monitoring (EM) (the third since 1999), the government is plan-
ning a huge increase in the use of GPS tracking by 2015, using a complex delivery infra-
structure – four interlocking companies providing staff, hardware, software and
phone-network services respectively, covering the whole country, each under separate
contract to central government, rather than the simple duopoly of G4S and Serco that
served ‘north’ and ‘south’ regions in the second contract. With 14,000 people per day (in
February 2014) on mostly radio frequency (rf) tagging (18% post-release; 32% bail: 50%
on community orders – half combined with other interventions) and an unspecified num-
ber on non-statutory, police-run GPS schemes in England and Wales (National Offender
Management Service, 2014), its EM programme is already the largest in Europe. The
Ministry of Justice has claimed that not only will the scale of EM use increase – 75,000
offenders per day within five years has been mooted – it has also been claimed, poten-
tially, as the most technologically advanced system in the world.
The developments are taking place under the Coalition’s Transforming Rehabilitation
agenda, or ‘rehabilitation revolution’ (Calder and Goodman, 2013; Grayling, 2013;
Ministry of Justice, 2010, 2012a, 2013a). This elaborates on the previous New Labour
government’s Transforming Justice agenda, begun in 2009 in the first round of cuts to
departmental budgets after the 2008 ‘banking crash’. Transforming Justice aimed at cre-
ating not ‘more for less’ but what it called a ‘better for less’ approach, which basically
meant that any innovative reconfiguration of public services that saved money would be
dubbed ‘better’, regardless of quality or virtue (see Macrae et al., 2011). The Coalition
reframed aspects of this in terms of its ‘big society’ agenda, steered from the Cabinet
Office (2010) (a high-level coordinating body, cutting across all government depart-
ments, backed by Prime Ministerial authority), in which voluntary and private organiza-
tions would gradually absorb a range of social care functions that had hitherto been the
preserve of the state. To this end, the Coalition decreed that the procurement and
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