Palgrave Pivot Electronic Monitoring: Tagging Offenders in a Culture of Surveillance

This book offers a systematic, sociological and penological exploration of the most up-to-date uses of electronic tagging (also known as electronic monitoring). With increasingly overcrowded prisons, electronic tagging has been proposed as an alternative form of punishment, and interest in this topic is growing throughout Europe. Current debates and research have often been limited to policy evaluation and effectiveness, whereas Electronic Monitoring examines the brand of punishment from a social-science perspective. This book explores the uses and history of electronic tagging, and draws upon the work of the Dutch criminologist Willem Nagel to reflect upon this form of punishment by examining its functions and dysfunctions. It speaks to those interested in criminal justice reform, surveillance, penology and penal innovation and probation.   Review “Daems impressively manages to grasp the topic of EM in its entirety and explains it in a very understandable way. The book could be of particular interest to people who are interested in the topics of supervision and penology.” (Melanie Schorsch, KULT_online - Review Journal for the Study of Culture, Issue 62, November, 2020) “The book is … an easy and quick read. … It is enough to make one think and ponder. … I strongly recommend this book, for its style, creativity and thought-provoking nature. I had the impression that my thoughts on electronic surveillance, although the fruit of many years of legal and empirical research, had been spontaneously reshuffled and restructured. I also felt that the rationale behind 20 years of French EM developments appeared more clearly.” (Martine Herzog-Evans, Journal of Probation, June 1, 2020) From the Back Cover This book offers a systematic, sociological and penological exploration of the most up-to-date uses of electronic tagging (also known as electronic monitoring). With increasingly overcrowded prisons, electronic tagging has been proposed as an alternative form of punishment, and interest in this topic is growing throughout Europe. Current debates and research have often been limited to policy evaluation and effectiveness, whereas Electronic Monitoring examines the brand of punishment from a social-science perspective. This book explores the uses and history of electronic tagging, and draws upon the work of the Dutch criminologist Willem Nagel to reflect upon this form of punishment by examining its functions and dysfunctions. It speaks to those interested in criminal justice reform, surveillance, penology and penal innovation and probation.  About the Author Tom Daems is Associate Professor at the Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven, Belgium. Previously he was Assistant Professor in Criminology and Sociology of Law at Ghent University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham, as well as at the London School of Economics.