Portable Prisons

Surveillance, punishment, and control now reach well beyond the walls of jails, prisons, and detention centres, which suggests the carceral is becoming a more common part of life than at any earlier time. Electronic monitoring is one clear example, since it extends the reach of incarceration into people's homes and daily routines.

Portable Prisons examines the electronic monitoring of offenders through an ethnographic case study set in Scotland. James Gacek argues that monitoring should be understood, in both its purpose and its effects, as a carceral practice and as an expression of the carceral state and its far-reaching power to punish. He shows that people on monitoring experience punishment through limits on their movement, space, and time, and that their accounts strongly overlap with those of prisoners he interviewed.

Gacek also shows how the neoliberal state hands the labour of punishment to private corporations and to the punished themselves. He rejects the notion that this kind of "soft" punishment has anything to do with the movement for decarceration. The book is an original contribution to the geography of incarceration and a detailed account of a field of growing significance.