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42 How. J. Crim. Just. 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/hjcj42 and id is 1 raw text is: The Howard journal Vol 42 No 1. February 2003 ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 1-31 News Media, Popular Culture and the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in England and Wales MIKE NELLIS Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice Studies, University of Birmingham Abstract: On 10January 2002, I was asked to provide a little expert comment on electronic monitoring (EM) on BBC Radio Birmingham's Late Show', the pretext being a newspaper report earlier that day indicating that Scotland was soon to roll out a national EM programme. It was clear when I met her that the show's host had no idea that electronic monitoring had already been underway in England and Wales for several years. Her immediate reaction to the idea of it was hostile: being sentenced to serve time in one's own living room hardly seemed like punishment. Several callers to the show were invited to comment on it in these terms, and most were adamant that it was obviously no substitute for imp isonment. The experience was, for me, indicative (in microcosm) of the generally poor quality of media debate about EM in England and Wales, and suggested that EM has simply not registered with the public as the tough punishment that its supporters hoped and its opponents feared it would be. This article is a preliminary attempt to map the nature and level of awareness that has been shown about EM in various manifestations of popular culture - the press, TV, cinema and literature - and to tentatively suggest why it has taken the forms that it has. The article understands popular culture primarily as a resource for interpreting and bestowing meaning upon EM but also, more cursorily, considers it as an aspect of the milieu in which creative technological developments are conceived. England and Wales first experimented with the electronic monitoring of offenders (EM) in 1989/90, renewed interest in it the mid-1990s, developed it country-wide in the late-1990s and now uses it on a larger proportion of its offenders than any other country - (whilst also having one of the highest prison populations in Europe). Thus far, it has been used to enforce home confinement. The present technology consists of a small transmitter fitted to the offender's ankle which, so long as the offender remains close to a signalling device installed in his home, can be monitored by a computer which may be hundreds of miles away. Voice recognition technology has also been experimented with in England, and in the USA experiments have been conducted to track the movements of convicted offenders using orbit- ing satellites; this latter technology is not yet commercially viable, although it is anticipated that it will become so (Renzema 1998). The capacity to track, rather than the possibly 'interim' measure of home confinement, has long been the ideal of Tom Stacey's Offender Tag Association (OTA), the 1 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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