Introduction
On 23 August 2013, Belgian newspaper De Tijd published a short report entitled âElectronic meal vouchers on the riseâ:
Slowly but surely, Belgians seem to be embracing electronic meal vouchers. This is the finding of a survey carried out by the retail federation Comeos. âOne in three meal vouchers currently handed out is electronicâ. In supermarkets, one in four payments with meal vouchers are already processed electronically. In restaurant chains, this figure is around 15 percent. More and more employers are therefore switching from paper versions of the vouchers to the system that uses cards on which a monthly amount is deposited. The electronic voucher was introduced two years ago.
That same day, on the same page, the same newspaper, in an adjacent column, published a report entitled âElectronic monitoring almost doubledâ:
The number of people under electronic monitoring has almost doubled in just over a year and a half to 1,567 ⊠Every day, around 1,500 people are monitored in this way, either with a traditional ankle bracelet or with a speech recognition system. This figure has almost doubled since the end of 2011, when 800 people were monitored in this way. By the end of this year, 4,500 people will have served their sentence via electronic monitoring. Only 9 percent of those involved commit another offence afterwards.
It seems unlikely that the simultaneous publication of both newspaper reports, so close together, is the result of a targeted editorial strategy. However, perhaps the publication of both reports together is not such a coincidence? It concerns two technological applications that, in a certain sense, characterise todayâs society and its fascination with electronics; both are also on the rise and quickly find their way to relevant customers; they also have a relatively short history and nothing seems to be standing in the way of a promising future.
Nevertheless, there are also important differences. The electronic meal voucher is a means of payment that allows one specific goal to be achieved: it makes it possible to successfully conclude a transaction and, as such, to realise the purchase of, for example, a loaf of bread, a bag of potatoes, a pizza or a tin of peas. This is somewhat more complex when it comes to electronic monitoring (hereinafter: EM). Indisputably, this also concerns a means of achieving a goal, but which goalâor goalsâare involved? On closer inspection, this does not seem to be particularly clear. For EM (as well as conditional and provisional release), the ministerial circular no. 1794 states the following: âThe law does not define any explicit objectives for these penalty implementation modalitiesâ (Ministry of Justice 2007: 22). In addition, the pursuit or achievement of a certain goal (such as reducing overcrowding ) can also lead to less effective action in another area (for example, the reintegration of those under surveillance). In contrast to electronic meal vouchers, it is not possible to understand EM without taking into account the operation and supervision by the agents involved: technicians, justice assistants, prison directors, monitoring staff, central administration, the police, investigating magistrates, housemates; their relative contributionâor lack thereofâexerts a decisive influence on the way in which surveillance will be exercised.
While most of us probably do not care that much about the fact that the success of the electronic meal voucher hardly provokes any debate, this is not the case for EM. A decade ago, in a reflection on ten years of policy and research on EM in Belgium (Daems et al. 2009a), we came to the conclusion that the use of EM in Belgium had increased rapidly in just ten years time, but that the available scientific research had played little or no role in policy decisions and that reflection on EMâs place in criminal justice was, for the main part, lacking. EM seemed to be, above all, a cheap and easily deployable means of remedying all kinds of problems in the Belgian criminal justice system:
If the seller of a new drug says it can have an effect against one or two diseases, maybe thereâs something to it. However, if it is presented as a remedy for just about all ailments, be aware of quackery ⊠these days, EM presents itself as a possible remedy for all kinds of shortcomings in our criminal justice system: some people want to make it a separate punishment, others see it as an alternative to pre-trial detention and others still see it as a better, more human and reintegration-oriented penalty implementation modality for the custodial sentence and just about everyone hopes it helps in the fight against the overcrowding of prisons. (Daems et al. 2009b: 127)
As we will discuss in the next section, in Belgium EM has not lost any of its appeal since then. Moreover, also in other countries in Europe and beyond we have seen a growing interest in tagging offendersâeven though the picture is complex and mixed. We will explore EM as part of contemporary cultures of surveillance in the next section of this chapter. For our purpose here we use the definition of EM of Nellis and Roswell, âEM technology must be understood as nothing more or less than a form of remote surveillant control, a means of flexibly regulating the spatial and temporal schedules of an offenderâs lifeâ (quoted in Nellis et al. 2013b: 4â5). As Nellis et al. (2013b: 5) suggest, this definition shows the âemptinessâ of EM as a stand-alone measure: âYet its âemptinessâ is also its strength (from the standpoint of politicians and criminal justice managers): it can be used in so many different ways, it can be ascribed many different aims and it can easily be adapted to different situationsâ (Nellis et al. 2013b: 5).
Radio-Frequency (RF) technology is still most commonly used to enforce a curfew or house arrest. Offenders usually wear an ankle bracelet or wristband that allows to monitor and verify their location. When offenders leave their home or other designated place (or when they tamper with the monitoring equipment) the system sets off an alarm signal. In recent years also Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have increasingly come to be used. One major difference is that these allow to track the movements of offenders and to create inclusion and exclusion zones (such as playgrounds, victimsâ home, schools etc.). The market of EM technologies is vibrant and constantly changing. Nowadays EM also takes place through enhanced models equipped with remote breath alcohol testers or transdermal alcohol testing systems; voice verification technology which uses biometric voiceprints; bilateral monitoring in cases of domestic violence which gives victims a device that alerts them when offenders are in their vicinity; and newer technologies using smartphones, apps, facial recognition and, in the future, maybe even gait analysis and heartbeat detection (see e.g., Gable 2017; Hucklesby et al. 2019; Thomas 2019). All of these applications share that they are about tagging and monitoring offenders in time and space, in order to verify where and when their bodies are situated, whether they are in the right place on the right moment.
In this little book we will focus on the functions of EM. In doing so, we are inspired by the Dutch criminologist Willem Nagel who wrote a fascinating and though-provoking book in 1977 entitled De funkties van de vrijheidstraf [The functions of imprisonment ]. In his study, Nagel identified 57 such functions. Upon closer inspection, a number of these functions were counted twice. In addition, not all of the functions he listed were dealt with in equal detailâand some not at all. By discussing the functions of imprisonment in this way, Nagel nevertheless demonstrated how complex the debate about imprisonment is (or at least how complex it should be) and which sometimes conflicting manifestâbut also latentâfunctions are involved. In the final section of this chapter, we will briefly discuss Nagelâs book and his distinctive approach towards studying the complex history of imprisonment . In Chapters 2 and 3 we will then attempt to replicate Nagelâs exercise, but applied to EM: what are the functions of EM? It is not our ambition to offer a systematic or exhaustive review of EM in this little book. Rather we aim to offer an exploration of 22 different functions of EM. As we will argue in the final chapter, such an exploration may be particularly useful and it may offer inspiration for future research and debate on EM in contemporary cultures of surveillance. Listing and discussing these functions in the next two chapters, in an alphabetical and uneven way, like Nagel did for the prison, will help us to defamiliarize EM, like it helped Nagel to question the natural, taken-for-granted character of the modern prison.
EM and Contemporary Cultures of Surveillance
The Birth and Spread of EM
The history of EM goes back at least to the early 1960s. In a brief article (âDelinquents with tape recordersâ) published in 1963 in New Society, a now defunct social science review that offered a forum to discuss and disseminate findings to a wider public, Schwitzgebel (1963) discussed some of the findings of a project called âStreetcorner researchâ, which started in 1958 in Boston, at Harvard University. For this project 20 young offenders were asked to talk into a tape recorder about self-chosen topics for about 2â3 hours a week. Towards the end of the article there were some brief observations on a newly designed electronic communications system. Delinquents attached a so-called âbehaviour transmitter reinforcerâ to their belt and wore it wherever they happened to go. The small unit transmitted a tone signal that could be received and recorded at the base station. Schwitzgebel went on to suggest that such âbehaviour transmitter reinforcersâ have at least three purposes: (1) research (recording the location of delinquents could help determine their whereabouts which may proof more reliable than self-reported data: âData obtained by electronic means are not subject to...