The pervasiveness of surveillance, punishment, and control within and outside of spaces such as jails, prisons, and detention centres suggests that the carceral is becoming an increasingly prevalent presence in our lives, going beyond historical standards. The contemporary use of electronic monitoring extends carceral territory beyond prison walls, into people’s homes and everyday lives.

Empirically and empathetically driven, Portable Prisons is a telling exploration of the electronic monitoring of offenders based on an ethnographic case study from Scotland. Electronic monitoring must be understood – in both intent and effect – as a carceral practice, an expression of the carceral state and its overreaching punitive capabilities. James Gacek demonstrates that various people experience punishment by means of restrictions around mobility, space, and time in ways that strongly overlap with the reported experiences of interviewed prisoners. Drawing attention to how the neoliberal state outsources the labour of punishment to private corporations and the punished themselves, he also rejects the idea that “soft” punishment is in any way related to the movement for decarceration.

Offering an original contribution to our understanding of the geography of incarceration, Portable Prisons is a sophisticated account of electronic monitoring, underlining the growing significance of this field.

James Gacek is a doctoral candidate at Edinburgh Law School. He continues to publish in areas of incarceration, genocidal carcerality, critical issues in media, justice, and security studies, the exploitation of human-animal relations, and the broader politics of judicial reasoning.

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“The most sophisticated theoretical account of electronic monitoring yet made available, Portable Prisons is a work of international significance, and will be of great interest to a wide range of penological and geographical scholars.” Mike Nellis, University of Strathclyde

“Gacek’s book is much needed to increase scholarly attention to the sanction of EM and similar technologies. Carceral and surveillance technologies are growing at a rapid pace worldwide, motivated by powerful private interests. Gacek writes to a scholarly audience who he hopes comes away with an appreciation for defining and naming the complex social, relational, and geographic dynamics integral to this type of surveillance experience. He also writes to a wider public who he hopes pauses to consider the implications of normalizing the expansion of carceral technologies. Gacek calls us as citizens to be unsettled by the ways in which we have normalized this surveillance and allowed it to expand and become routine.” Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books

“Portable Prisons offers an original and important contribution to our understanding of EM [electronic monitoring] specifically and to the geography of incarceration more generally. Gacek implores the wider public to be unsettled by the normalization of expanding carceral technologies in our everyday life.” Theoretical Criminology