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On 10 January 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 imprisonment. 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.

`The life history approach is peculiarly ignored in teaching contexts' wrote Ken Plummer in 1983 (p.74). Things may have changed on ordinary social science degrees, but offender/prisoner autobiographies--akin to the life story approach--are a still underused resource in the training of probation officers. The criminological importance of such autobiographies was recently affirmed by the late Steve Morgan (1999), adroitly re-therorised by Goodey (2000) and used constructively by Wilson and Reuss (2000) in a study of prison(er) education. This article describes, from experience, how they can be used at the beginning of a probation training programme, to develop a preliminary understanding of desistance, and to open up debate on what works with offenders and what doesn't, in and out of prison. An historical background to British prisoner autobiographies is provided to ground this approach to teaching in a distinctive criminological discourse, to provide a resource for those who wish to take debate on prisoner autobiographies further, and to indicate the kind of impact that the best of this writing has had on the penal reform process. The article should be read both as a contribution to an overdue, and at present meagre, debate on how an academically sound and vocationally relevant curriculum for trainee probation officers can be constructed, and as an at least partial substantiation of the deeper argument that probation training can draw productively on traditions of penal reform which it has hitherto neglected.

Amongst the staff in the highly managerialised agencies of contemporary criminal justice, there is a clear and often painful awareness of ever-tighter deadlines and increasing time scarcity. Nonetheless it has been correctly observed that `academic investigation of such issues has been hampered by the limited conceptions of time involved' (Whipp 1994, p. 100). This is particularly true in criminology. The sociological understanding of time has grown apace in recent years (Adam 1990, 1995; Hassard 1990) but tends to have remained a specialist preserve which has impacted little on reflection about criminal justice processes, Pratt (1990) and Matthews (1999) excepted. As a result `our maps of time within [criminal justice] organisations of the late twentieth century are still woefully inadequate' (Whipp 1994, p. 112, my addition). This article is an implicit commendation of the `sociology of time' to criminologists, and an explicit application of some of its concepts and insights to the emerging National Probation Service in England and Wales, as projected in its recent mission statement, A New Choreography. The targets and deadlines set for the new Service are premised upon a commonplace but problematic notion of `managerial time', which in a variety of ways is at odds with the feasible pace of change in the many local communities with which the Service will be working.

The influence of John Galsworthy's play `Justice' (1910) in securing reductions in the time convicts spent in separate confinement has been widely acknowledged, in a rather minor way, in a [...]

This detailed, 'credit-where-credit-is-due' account of English penal policy in the four decades following the Gladstone Committee breaks new ground in its coverage of the 1920s and 1930s, and, for the [...]

Criminologists will learn a great deal from this book about the approach to anti-racism which is being taken in the Anglo-Welsh Probation Service, and in probation training. It will be [...]

The editors of this valuable book are over-modest about its achievements. It is true, as they say, that it is |only a partial survey of the many issues, concerns and [...]

England and Wales is the only European jurisdiction to have experimented with electronic monitoring of offenders, or 'tagging'. Three experimental schemes, ostensibly targeted on remand prisoners, were established late in 1989, intended to run for six months. On the available evidence they have not been a success. Yet the recent government White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public (Home Office 1990b) continues to promote the idea of 'tagging', suggesting that this work be undertaken by a private agency rather than the probation service which-unlike its equivalent in the USA--has dissociated itself from this new development. This paper aims only to map the contours of debate on electronic monitoring in England and Wales, in the context of moves to develop more coercive non-custodial measures generally, and to raise some examples of the moral and political issues to which tagging gives rise.