The UK’s Sentencing Act Leaves the Door Open for Big Tech to Build Digital Prisons

The United Kingdom government is actively courting Big Tech to build the infrastructure of a new, distributed system of punishment. Under the banner of addressing prison overcrowding, ministers are accelerating efforts to develop and deploy surveillance technologies designed to monitor people in the community, effectively outsourcing key components of criminal justice to private technology firms.

Ahead of the publication of the Independent Sentencing Review — a government-commissioned inquiry into long-term solutions to prison overcrowding — the Ministry of Justice hosted a roundtable last year with key UK representatives of approximately 30 corporations, including Microsoft, Google, and Palantir, to develop new surveillance technologies to monitor people in the community.

Minutes of the meeting, obtained by a Freedom of Information request by the charity Foxglove, show the tech firms put forward highly experimental and hitherto untested technologies such as robotics “to manage prisoner movement and containment,” tracking devices under the skin, and quantum computing to “predict future behaviors.” Foxglove’s director of advocacy, Donald Campbell, called the proposals “alarmingly dystopian” and the union between justice ministers and tech firms “chilling.”

This engagement has continued. Two months later, Prisons Minister James Timpson solidified his “tech-led approach to justice” by hosting a ‘Dragon’s Den style pitch’ where seven technology companies put forward similarly disturbing ideas to surveil offenders in the community, such as smell-monitors composed of synthetic brain cells and AI to detect drug usage.

UK’s prison capacity crisis

Since early 2023, England and Wales’ prison capacity crisis has become acute, with prisons operating at 99% and above, driving up rates of self-harm, violence and deaths.

Though framed as a novel crisis, prisons in England and Wales has been operating at or near capacity for over three decades. For context, England and Wales has the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe and the prison population has doubled over the past 30 years despite crime rates falling by close to 90%. The pace at which the prison population is rising cannot match the pace of constructing new prisons – triggering then Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood to commission the Independent Sentencing Review to find long-term solutions to ensure the country “never again” has “more prisoners than prison places”. By explicitly stating a necessity to invest in “technology to monitor offenders in the community”, the review echoed Mahmood’s previous comments that framed Big Tech’s capacity to create “a digital prison outside prison” as a panacea to the prison capacity crisis.

The Sentencing Act and the expansion of digital control

The Sentencing Act became law in January 2026 and contains reforms that further the Independent Sentencing Review’s recommendations to expand community sentences. Alongside the largest-ever expansion of electronic tagging, it ensures community sentences are prioritized by introducing a presumption that short sentences (12 months or less) will be served in the community as suspended sentences, which came into effect in late March. It also increases the length of time that a sentence can be suspended, from two to three years.

But these measures do not simply relocate punishment but reconfigure it. The Act grants new powers to judges to ban offenders from attending public events, entering drinking establishments, prohibiting driving, and requiring someone to stay within newly created ‘restriction zones’. In addition, the Probation Service will be able to broaden the application of drug testing.

Each of these conditions is, in practice, a demand for monitoring infrastructure. Compliance depends not on periodic human oversight but on continuous data collection, automated alerts, and real-time enforcement. This creates both the justification and the market for new forms of surveillance technology. Community sentencing, in this sense, is a platform for scaling digital control.

Though electronic tags and alcohol sobriety bracelets are already in use in the UK, a host of other technologies for offenders are currently in pilot phases (AI face scanning apps and proximity monitoring technology) or have simply not been invented yet — meaning that the effects of digital imprisonment on people’s physical and mental wellbeing cannot yet be fully known.

E-carceration in the United States: a cautionary tale

The US, however, is further along the journey towards constructing digital prisons — and the results serve as a cautionary tale. Many states have embedded the use of apps to monitor people on remand, serving sentences in the community, or on parole.

Applications such as Shadowtrack deploy voice-recognition algorithms that it claims can detect drug or alcohol usage and demand that any user must always share their location to enable a parole officer to send a location request at any time. Keck, a user of the app, commented that the “peace of mind, of not having somebody track your every move… it was like being locked up again.” Michael, a user of another app called SmartLINK, which requires a check-in through scanning your face, described how the app had made him fearful of being rearrested for a technical violation. SmartLINK has also been used in immigration detention, with one user, Maria, describing it as an invisible leash, as on some days it forced her to check in ten times. The app interfaces with BI TotalAccess Software, meaning that BI collects in-app activity about web browsing, phone calls and search history.

As SCRAM Continuous Alcohol Monitoring (CAM) bracelets have been in America for 17 years prior to their introduction to the UK in 2020, more people have spoken out about the harms they experienced while wearing them. People ordered to wear the bracelets, which detect alcohol in sweat, told Injustice Watch researchers that the bracelets' vibrations from the constant 30-minute readings kept them up at night. One man from Illinois developed a serious skin condition from wearing the bracelet, complained of burning sensations, and became anxious about the transmission of wireless signals around his body on his long-term health. More broadly, people have felt stigmatized as a result of wearing the bracelet.

The Vera Institute, a New York-based coalition working to end mass incarceration, has noted that technologies like ShadowTrack and SmartLINK often suffer from malfunctions, all of which can lead to re-arrest and potentially serving a longer prison sentence in a phenomenon known as up-tariffing. They have highlighted that the ease of surveillance through electronic monitoring intensified the surveillance, referencing one app that enforced five random breathalyzer tests a day. Similarly, an investigation by Injustice Watch observed how a judge ordered defendants to wear SCRAM bracelets even though they had not been charged with any alcohol-related offenses.

In addition to obvious concerns it raises about privacy, with the data collected potentially shared with third parties for advertising, more broadly, the Vera Institute has made clear how these electronic monitoring devices “enable agencies to expand carceral control over the ‘lowest-risk’ people, without questioning whether they should be surveilled in the first place.” Some private companies supplying these devices invoice people per day for their use and sue when they fail to pay, a serious issue when considering that it is working-class people who are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system.

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, emphasizes in a 2018 New York Times article how being sentenced to an “open-air digital prison” has far-reaching consequences by making it near-impossible to stay employed, care for dependents, or attend classes, keeping entire communities locked out of opportunities. Pointing out the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal justice system, she claimed “digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery,” with tech firms coming out on top as the clear winners, as their profits only accumulate as ever more people are handed community sentences.

Resisting the development of digital prisons in the UK

Implementation of the Sentencing Act will be phased over the next two years, during which time we can expect the government to deepen its relationship with Big Tech and inject funding for them to develop and roll out technologies for offenders. Simultaneously, the courts will sentence more and more people to community sentences. Rather than accepting the construction of digital prisons as an inevitability, the UK must organize itself to resist the encroachment of Big Tech in criminal justice.

Academics, lawyers, grassroots groups, think tanks and non-governmental organizations working across digital rights, prison abolition, and transformative justice must come together to scrutinize the government’s actions and corporations’ emergent technologies and assess the potential harm. Collaboratively, they must develop a strategy rooted in decarceration to provide a wall of resistance to the expansion of prisons in any form, physical or digital, and ensure a reduction in the number of people sentenced altogether.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s and do not represent any organization.