The Swedish and the Anglo-Welsh electronic monitoring (EM) schemes are the oldest in Western Europe. England and Wales ran the first EM pilot scheme in 1989/90, but did not create a national scheme until 1999, which rapidly became, and remains, Europe’s largest. Sweden initiated pilots in 1994, which segued into a fully national scheme (Europe’s first) in 1996. Arguably the most striking difference between the two schemes is that from the outset England and Wales outsourced the delivery of EM to the private sector, whereas Sweden developed it from within their probation service, using a commercial organization only to provide technology. This article − a limited exercise in comparative criminal justice − will explore the developmental trajectories of EM policy in the two countries, in three phases, noting the political context in each and focusing on questions of ‘integrating’ EM with probation, both at the institutional level (structures of service delivery) and at the practical level (individual supervision). While there are inevitably difficulties in comparing such differently-sized countries (9.4m and 51m respectively, in 1994), and correspondingly different probation services, it is the relationship between ‘ideology’, ‘policy’ and ‘institutional structures’ (and the effect of the latter on practice) that is being kept to the fore here, in order to illustrate the point that similar ideological and political shifts in two countries may not necessarily reconfigure institutional arrangements in the same way, or at the same pace, or with the same outcomes. The article concludes with reflections on the near-inevitability of EM being used, in some shape or form, by all contemporary penal policy makers, because of its affinity with neoliberal political movements and the increasing ease with which it can be customized from ubiquitous information and communication technology infrastructures.

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