This book investigates electronic monitoring: the ankle tags and digitally enforced curfews increasingly deployed globally for parole, probation and bail. It is an intimate, detailed ethnographic study of the everyday experiences of people serving electronic monitoring sentences and those around them, drawing on critical criminology and actor-network theory to consider whether electronic monitoring is truly a punishment and whether it can reduce criminal offending.
Drawing on original ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2020 in England and Wales, the book follows 21 people wearing tags and 11 family and friends whose lives become entangled with the carceral technology. It contains considerably more first-hand testimony from monitored people, whom it calls ‘hosts’, than comparable studies, offering an unusually rich and detailed picture. Using innovative theoretical perspectives that emphasise the importance of material technologies in ordering social life (actor-network theory), the volume examines whether electronic monitoring achieves its penal aims of enforcing curfews and supporting desistance from crime, or functions simply as a punishment, digitally chaining users and turning homes into prisons. It shows that outcomes vary depending on how its demands subtly and overtly reshape relationships, routines, and perceptions while extending surveillance into daily life.
Written for those interested in punishment, crime, technology and social control, Life on Tag integrates wider arguments about criminal justice transformation, providing a timely analysis as electronic monitoring evolves towards more refined and totalising systems. This will be a useful resource for students, scholars and practitioners engaged with questions of technology, surveillance, control, and punishment.
