Description
Book SynopsisPortable Prisons is an exploration of the electronic monitoring of offenders based on an ethnographic case study from Scotland. Through interviews and observations, Gacek demonstrates this technology is representative of the carceral state’s overreaching punitive capabilities, rejecting the idea that “soft” punishment is related to decarceration.
Trade Review“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
