In an small office in a private company in Boulder, Colorado there is continual 24 hour a day activity. In this small space (roughly four times the size of an average lounge room) there are fifteen computer terminals and a couple of fax machines. At any one time about sixteen people are monitoring the data coming through the terminals and sending off fax messages about the 3,000 or so people under the surveillance of this private profit making company (BI Inc.) to US territories from Guam to Alaska, an area that spans more than half the world. These are the places which have subcontracted out to this private company the responsibility for monitoring the movements of people living in their own homes when that home has been constituted as a prison cell.

This is part of the new face of penal surveillance. In the early 1970s the idea of electronically monitored parole was mooted within the Correctional Services Department in NSW. However the first Electronically Monitored Home Confinement (EMHC) programme did not occur until 1982 in New Mexico in the US. Since then this form of penal surveillance has expanded exponentially, spreading first of all across the USA and Canada then by the 1990s to Europe, Australia and countries within the Asia Pacific region. Concerns about this fusion of technologically based surveillance and penal control centre around three issues: first, the transfer of penal control from the state to the market (the sphere of profitability); second, the global reach of penal surveillance; and third, the transformation of the home into an area of penal control and surveillance.

Privatisation of penal surveillance and control

The office workers/surveillance officers in Boulder, Colorado have their counterparts in a number of other offices in private firms across mainland USA. Hawaiian prisoners for example are being monitored through a similar office in Florida. BI Inc. has a second and equally wide ranging monitoring system based in Anderson, Indiana. A key factor in the profitability of these new companies is that their annual sales figures depend less upon the sale of the equipment alone than upon their 'packages' of equipment and monitoring services. Whilst the debate about privatisation of penal control tends to centre on the issue of private prisons, the spread of these 'service packages' inserts profit motivation into penal systems in a less overt but equally significant fashion.

Globalisation and penal surveillance

B.I. Inc., the company in Boulder, has 'market penetration' in Sweden, Puerto Rico, Singapore and Canada. and has competed for the contract being developed by the Dutch penal authorities. In the US private companies' recent bids to be part of the UK's second experiment with electronically monitored home detention, it was argued that, as the technology to monitor at a distance had already been developed and implemented in the US, it would be possible to provide a trans-Atlantic (and thus cheaper) system of monitoring, bypassing the necessity to install the basic monitoring infrastructure in the UK -- a proposal that would extend the boundaries of social control from national to international forms of penal surveillance. In the present political climate the Home Office in England rejected this offer. Nevertheless BI Inc.'s Annual Report emphasises the pressure it is prepared to exert on correctional departments across the world in order to 'increase value for our shareholders'.

The home as a prison

The exponential growth in EMHC programmes throughout the world has been due to the particular contradictions facing political administrations in modern societies. Institutional imprisonment is increasingly expensive yet seen to be correctionally ineffective. The community based alternatives to imprisonment are cheaper but often regarded as 'soft options' politically too dangerous to be used effectively. Against this background home based intensive surveillance becomes an attractive penal package seeming to promise the hard control of imprisonment with the relative cheapness of community based sanctions.

There are a range of issues that need to be raised about this form of de-institutionalisation in the penal sphere. Home detention is literally imprisonment within the home. The prisoner has to remain in the home under intensive surveillance. The surveillance is usually by random telephone contact, and by visits of the supervising officer. The telephone contacts can be made at any time of the day or night creating a panopticon effect: if the prisoners do not know when the calls will be they are potentially under surveillance at any time during the 24 hours, so have to act as though they were under perpetual surveillance. The issues of domesticity and power when home is the prison are rarely addressed in detail. Amanda George (1988) has pointed to the problems that continual surveillance constrains the family as well as the prisoner and that family or friends who share the house will be both co-prisoners and warders. Malcolm Feiner (1987) argues that families who fear violence from a prisoner are put into an untenable position: if they object to a prisoner being released into the home they may experience subsequent vengeful behaviour. J. Quinn and J. Holman (1991) have found that family conflict in households of home prisoners is related to two factors -- household size and the numbers of children in the household -- with conflict increasing with the number of children and decreasing with the size of the household.

There is now an extensive literature on the unpaid work of caring. In home imprisonment the caring work of the prisoner's family is fused with the work of controlling: the several ways in which normal aspects of family life become criminogenic with the insertion of the prison into the home -- the failure to get a job, going out even into the back yard without supervision, driving a car, having a drink, having a day off work, indicate that the mediating and negotiating skills of the domestic labour of caring are likely to become an increasingly important feature of penality. This new form of the family work of caring, caring for home-prisoners, is predominantly the work of women caring for men-as-breadwinners. It is one of the major paradoxes of intensive surveillance that the potential for the globalisation of penal control that is embedded within the technological aspects of home imprisonment schemes depends on this expansion of the unpaid emotional labour of domestic life.