Electronic Monitoring and Family Life

Abstract

Electronically monitored curfew orders (a community penalty) and electronically monitored home detention curfew (HDC, early release for short sentence prisoners) became nationally available in 1999, the former after a series of pilots beginning in 1996, and a brief bail experiment in 1989/1990. The advent of electronic monitoring technology made the wider use of curfew orders possible. These had been legally available since 1982 but little used because they were hard to monitor and enforce, and because the Probation Service was ideologically opposed to the imposition of night-time restrictions on offenders, other than in hostels. This stance, whilst grounded in important principles, nonetheless ignored Home Office research which showed that significant proportions of parents welcomed state-imposed curfews on the grounds that they would augment their authority to insist that kids were indoors by a certain time (Riley and Shaw 1985).