Carceral geographers working on notions of the porosity of the prison boundary, embodiment, (im)mobility, and issues of extended surveillance and control beyond the prison (especially re electronic tagging and/or disclosure), may be interested to offer views to the Scottish Government.

Prior to considering the Scottish Government’s ‘Management of Offenders Bill’, the Justice Committee is launching a call for evidence.

According to the call: ‘The Bill seeks to enable greater use of electronic tagging, reduces the time before a conviction is ‘spent’ for the purposes of disclosure, and alters the makeup of Parole Boards. The changes proposed to tagging could lead to offenders wearing tags fitted with more advanced GPS location technology. Ministers also foresee a point where tags could be used to detect alcohol or drugs in an offender’s system. The Bill would enable these and other measures in future. Elsewhere, the Bill reforms the law on disclosing past offences to others, such as potential employers. The overall direction of travel is towards reducing the requirement to disclose by lowering the time limits before convictions become “spent”. For example the disclosure period for a prison sentence of between 1 and 2 years falls from 10 to 3 years. So-called “higher level” disclosure, affecting sensitive areas of employment, is not affected by the Bill. The Scottish Government’s stated aims are to have more focus on crime prevention, rehabilitation, and support for victims.’