Information Technology and the Family: Electronic Surveillance and Home Imprisonment

The development of information technologies has led to the restructuring of the boundaries within and between organizations in a number of areas of social life. Examines the impact of a specific form of information technology being introduced in the field of punishment and control– the electronic monitoring of sentenced offenders. Electronic surveillance and home imprisonment are features of the current restructuring of the boundaries between prison, work and family life. It is both the physical and the cultural boundaries between “home” and“prison” that are being readjusted. Over the past 200 years these two spheres of social life have been constructed around incompatible sets of values. However the complex contradictions involved in making the boundaries between these two spheres more permeable have not been fully explored in current penal discourses.