Electronic Monitoring (EM) was delivered on to the global correctional scene as a potentially more effective, humane (and dubiously, cheaper) alternative to imprisonment. For different reasons, that prospect is exciting for some practitioners and bureaucrats as well as for old school Abolitionists. Others remain cynical, but the more common response is generally a lack of sustained engagement by the academy with the possibilities (good and bad) of this new penal form. We therefore owe the editors of this collection, Nellis, Beyens and Kaminski, a great debt for opening up the critical dialogue about EM as the new baby of penality.

The major surprise about EM’s development is that it took so long to be born. Like the computer in Star Trek, we instinctively grasped tagging and monitoring well before EM technology became a realistic possibility. Monitoring ‘anti-social behaviour’ remotely has, after all, been a staple of dystopian literature even before, and certainly after, Orwell. Yet, e ...