From de-carceration to e-carceration? Current realities and challanges with electronic monitoring in France, the United States and Brazil

Resumo

Since the early 1970s, the United States has experienced a punitive cycle of “tough on crime” legislation that produced a prison population exceeding two million by 2009, prompting states to turn to electronic monitoring (EM) as a cost-saving alternative. By December 2015, electronically supervised populations had grown nearly 140 percent in a decade, reaching close to half a million by 2022 and raising fundamental questions about whether EM reduces criminal-legal entanglement or instead reconstructs incarceration in technological form. In France, EM has evolved since its 1997 introduction from a localized experiment into a nationally embedded sanction central to sentence adjustment and probation, including recent proximity-based applications. While policymakers frame EM as a tool to reduce imprisonment, concerns persist regarding net-widening, proportionality, privacy, and human rights. Brazil offers a third trajectory, adopting EM primarily as a pragmatic response to chronic prison overcrowding and limited probation capacity. Under the National Council of Justice’ initiative, EM has expanded across states in pretrial, sentence progression, and parole contexts, alleviating systemic pressure but facing fragmented implementation and weak rehabilitative framing that risk undermining legitimacy and expanding penal control. This study provides a comparative analysis of EM in the United States, France, and Brazil to examine the structural similarities and divergences shaping its use across the world-economy. By situating these national trajectories within a global context, the article interrogates whether EM functions as a humane and legitimate supervisory tool or an unchecked extension of penal control, concluding that its legitimacy depends less on the device itself than on the justice philosophy underlying its deployment.