VDM Verlag Understanding the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders: Commercial Criminal Justice in England and Wales

Since the 1980s the British government has promoted the role of the private security industry within criminal justice. Privately run prisons, young offender institutions, secure training centres for children and immigration detention centres are all now components of a commercial market in incarceration. The electronic monitoring of offenders represents an extension of commercial forms of social control beyond prisons and into domestic spaces. This monograph looks at the role of the commercial sector as service providers of electronic monitoring and outlines how multinational corporations have come to dominate, and subsequently expand, the global market in technocorrections and incarceration. The monograph provides an ethnographic study of TagCo, an electronic monitoring service provider, in order to introduce the reader to the administration of commercial criminal justice and the impact this has upon offenders and other criminal justice institutions.