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The term 'digital justice' has been used by the Scottish Government to delineate the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) in its civil, administrative and criminal justice systems. This paper concentrates on the latter area, outlining the content of the original 2014 digital justice strategy document and the subsequent Holyrood conferences used to promote it (Scottish Government, 2014). It notes gaps in the strategy, not least a failure to specify what human beings could and should be doing in digitized justice systems, and ambiguity about the endpoint of 'full digitization', which could be very threatening to existing forms of professional practice. It sets the policy debate in the broader context of increasing automation and the more critical literature on digitization, concluding with recommendations for a revised policy document, ideas which may be of interest outside Scotland.

On 10 January 2002, I was asked to provide a little expert comment on electronic monitoring (EM) on BBC Radio Birmingham's 'Late Show', the pretext being a newspaper report earlier that day indicating that Scotland was soon to roll out a national EM programme. It was clear when I met her that the show's host had no idea that electronic monitoring had already been underway in England and Wales for several years. Her immediate reaction to the idea of it was hostile: being sentenced to serve time in one's own living room hardly seemed like punishment. Several callers to the show were invited to comment on it in these terms, and most were adamant that it was obviously no substitute for imprisonment. The experience was, for me, indicative (in microcosm) of the generally poor quality of media debate about EM in England and Wales, and suggested that EM has simply not registered with the public as the tough punishment that its supporters hoped and its opponents feared it would be. This article is a preliminary attempt to map the nature and level of awareness that has been shown about EM in various manifestations of popular culture – the press, TV, cinema and literature – and to tentatively suggest why it has taken the forms that it has. The article understands popular culture primarily as a resource for interpreting and bestowing meaning upon EM but also, more cursorily, considers it as an aspect of the milieu in which creative technological developments are conceived.

'The life history approach is peculiarly ignored in teaching contexts' wrote Ken Plummer in 1983 (p.74). Things may have changed on ordinary social science degrees, but offender/prisoner autobiographies — akin to the life story approach — are a still underused resource in the training of probation officers. The criminological importance of such autobiographies was recently affirmed by the late Steve Morgan (1999), adroitly re–therorised by Goodey (2000) and used constructively by Wilson and Reuss (2000) in a study of prison(er) education. This article describes, from experience, how they can be used at the beginning of a probation training programme, to develop a preliminary understanding of desistance, and to open up debate on what works with offenders and what doesn't, in and out of prison. An historical background to British prisoner autobiographies is provided to ground this approach to teaching in a distinctive criminological discourse, to provide a resource for those who wish to take debate on prisoner autobiographies further, and to indicate the kind of impact that the best of this writing has had on the penal reform process. The article should be read both as a contribution to an overdue, and at present meagre, debate on how an academically sound and vocationally relevant curriculum for trainee probation officers can be constructed, and as an at least partial substantiation of the deeper argument that probation training can draw productively on traditions of penal reform which it has hitherto neglected.