The experiment with electronic monitoring (tagging) was a hasty response to the longstanding penal crisis in Britain, a crisis exacerbated by a 79-percent increase in recorded crime during the Thatcher era and accompanied by growing public concern over crime. The government's confidence in electronic monitoring as a means of reducing prison populations overlooked the failure of increased community-based correctional alternatives to reduce prison populations, the difficulty in selecting offenders, the importance of probation service participation in the counseling and support of offenders, and other problems. Prison overcrowding has resulted from unnecessary pretrial detentions, from the incarceration of too many minor offenders, and from pressures from those with vested interests in large prison populations. Thus, Great Britain's crisis is one of policy; electronic monitoring has proved to be only a brief and ineffective distraction from the basic issue. Nevertheless, the manufacturers of electronic monitoring devices will undoubtedly seek other customers; despite privacy and autonomy concerns, electronic monitoring is already being used to monitor the locations of office workers and facilities for the care of the elderly. Notes and 60 references