When Punishment Begins at Home: Understanding the Drivers of Penal Experience Within Norway’s Electronic Monitoring Program

Abstract

Norway’s correctional geography has shifted dramatically, with 40% of “unconditional prison sentences” now being served exclusively via front-door electronic monitoring (EM). This turn to EM aims to reduce negative consequences of imprisonment, but how is EM experienced by those punished this way? Through interviews with EM-clients, this study analyzes penal experiences along Sexton’s framework of penal consciousness and Todd-Kvam’s framework of pain vs. suffering. Clients experienced pains from EM’s restrictions on their movements, but when weighed against imprisonment, the salience and severity of EM was often ameliorated. Some clients, however, experienced suffering, thus contrasting EM’s punitive contours, even as a penal alternative, against its proposed benefits.

Introduction

Electronic monitoring (EM) describes the use of digital technologies, often in the form of ankle bracelets, to survey and restrict the lives of people in the justice system. Both EM’s implementation and rationale vary greatly by jurisdiction. EM can be used as a penal additive and/or as a penal alternative. As a penal additive, EM involves an extra aspect of surveillance imposed upon people who would otherwise receive a less intrusive form of community-based control (e.g., conditional release on parole). As a penal alternative, EM means people who would otherwise be imprisoned can instead serve their sentence at home.

The use of EM, particularly as a penal additive, has paralleled the increasing apparatus of community corrections worldwide. In Europe, the expansion of EM, along with other community sanctions, has not been accompanied by related decreases in imprisonment. Instead, it has produced net widening effects as countries with high rates of imprisonment similarly adapt high rates of community sanction use (Aebi et al., 2015). In the US, EM practices have been criticized for undermining rights to privacy (Kirk-Werner, 2025), prohibitive user fees, and placing the burden of social support on recipients’ families (Kilgore, 2012). EM’s substantial use during parole, following the completion of court-mandated sentences, has prompted the Vera Institute of Justice to label the sanction an extension of mass incarceration (Dholakia, 2024).

Conversely, EM has been lauded for its potential as an effective and cost-efficient method of decarceration (Ball & Lilly, 1986; Hucklesby & Holdsworth, 2016). The American Probation and Parole Association (APPA, 2020) has claimed EM is not inherently punitive, and, when used as a penal alternative, eliminates “negative impacts of incarceration”. Further, some international studies show that EM, as a penal alternative, reduces recidivism relative to jail or imprisonment (DiTella & Schargrodsky, 2013; Grenet et al., 2024; Henneguelle et al., 2016) and produces positive economic effects (L. H. Andersen & Andersen, 2014, Grenet et al., 2024), though meta-analyses show these results vary across different program designs (Belur et al., 2020; Renzema & Mayo-Wilson, 2005).

One jurisdiction that reports positive effects from EM is Norway. Though Norway’s recidivism rate is already low by international standards (S. N. Andersen et al., 2020), EM has reduced recidivism for its participants by a further 19% (S. N. Andersen & Telle, 2019) while growing rapidly as an alternative to prison. In 2024, over 40% of people who received an “unconditional prison sentence” avoided prison entirely, instead exclusively serving their time through EM (Kriminalomsorgsdirektoratet [KDI], 2024b; Ministry of Justice, 2024, 2025). Norway frames EM as avoiding “potential negative consequences of incarceration” (Regulations relating to the Execution of Sentences Act, 2002, §7-2), and as aligning with the “principle of normalization” outlined by the Norwegian Correctional Service (NCS) as guiding the serving of criminal sentences (Ministry of Justice, 2025; cf. 2008). Policymakers, whose support for EM has also been significantly influenced by its cost-saving benefits (Todd-Kvam, 2023) and reduction of the prison queue (Øster & Rokkan, 2018), contend that no prison setting could be more “normal” than one’s own home (Ministry of Justice, 2024).

Scandinavian prisons have been declared “exceptionally” humane on account of their material conditions and short sentence lengths (Pratt, 2008), and Norway’s turn to front-door EM would appear to align with such thinking. However, even as a penal alternative, Norway’s program is not without additive contours; while EM has decreased Norway’s use of imprisonment (KDI, 2024a), judges have increasingly preferred “unconditional prison sentences” to traditional parole work since EM’s inception (S. N. Andersen et al, 2020). More generally, the lived experience of EM is significantly understudied. Though EM involves unique pains (Payne & Gainey, 1998; Richter et al., 2021), it is unclear how it is perceived as a punishment beyond its frequent comparisons to prison (Kirk, 2020).

Exploring Norway’s program thus provides a unique opportunity to understand the drivers of correctional experience on EM, and by extension, EM’s punitiveness as a penal alternative. Through interviews conducted with EM-clients, this article situates the experience of EM against its theorized benefits, while also being one of the first studies of this important development in the Norwegian penal field for an international audience.

The Implementation of EM in Norway

EM in Norway is not handed down by a court (Rasmussen et al., 2024). Instead, after a judge imposes an “unconditional prison sentence”, those eligible for EM may apply directly through the NCS via a discretionary review process or otherwise serve their sentence in prison. ¹ Currently, sentences of 6 months or less are eligible to be served via EM, with additional restrictions against violent or sex offenses. Additionally, there are no user fees for those on EM in Norway. Around 95% of those granted EM successfully complete their sentence, with the remaining 5% transferred to prison, primarily for violations of the program’s zero-tolerance drug and alcohol policy (KDI, 2024b). Clients approved for EM are expected to attend school, work, or volunteering for 20 to 45 hr a week and are granted 7 hr of weekly leave to tend to errands, family duties, and leisure time. Clients must attend one meeting a week with an EM-officer, where they schedule their upcoming leave time or can discuss any challenges they have been facing. Outside of these scheduled hours, clients are expected to be home at all times.

Currently, Norway utilizes both radio frequency (RF) and global positioning system (GPS) ankle bracelet technologies, albeit that RF was used in all but nine cases in 2024 (KDI, 2025b) since GPS tracking is considered to be particularly invasive. EM-officers also survey clients through weekly visits to homes and workplaces, which themselves are designed to be minimally invasive; officers arrive at both types of visits in plainclothes and in a civilian car. During work visits, officers do not exit the car and leave after the client is visually identified on site. At home visits, officers conduct an alcohol test before leaving.

Electronic Monitoring and the Lived Experience of Punishment

Norwegian criminologist Christie’s (1981/2007) preferred definition of punishment was as pain, intended as pain. Since this pain is facilitated by the imposition of sanctions, both deliberately and as unavoidable elements of such actions (Sykes, 1958/1974, p.64), the correctional service is thus, as characterized by Christie, a pain-delivery system. ² Historically, descriptions of the pains of imprisonment have been oriented around Sykes’ seminal work, where he identified five deprivations of prison life: of autonomy, of goods and services, of liberty, of heterosexual relationships, and of security (Sykes, 1958/1974). Since this time, this framework has evolved to describe a variety of penal settings and experiences, including EM.

Richter et al. (2021) translated Sykes’ five pains into an EM context, additionally observing financial pains from user fees and physical pains from ankle bracelets, while Payne and Gainey (1998) described pain on EM as also stemming from the proximity to, but lack of, freedom – a phenomenon they dubbed the “watching others effect”. In a different non-traditional carceral setting, Norway’s open prisons, similar “pains of freedom” have addressed confusion among prisoners who move between “normal” settings and traditional penal limitations (Shammas, 2014). Other studies on EM have additionally identified “pains of privacy” related to both actual and perceived surveillance (Kirk-Werner, 2025) and gendered pains (Maidment, 2002). At the same time, Sykes’ deprivation of security is often observed as less prevalent on EM (Payne & Gainey, 1998), while some people on EM report mainly positive relationship effects (Gibbs & King, 2003; Vanhaelemeesch et al., 2014).

Alternatively, Crewe (2011) suggested a foundation for pains based on “tightness”. He identified that while prisons (at least in his native England) were less physically burdensome than before, uncertainty and anxiety among prisoners toward risk-based systems of rule created “lighter but tighter” prison experiences. Seeing similar elements of control in EM, Hucklesby et al. (2021; Hucklesby & Holdsworth, 2016) modified Crewe’s framework to compare several European EM programs. They describe tightness as an effect mutually reinforced by a sentence’s length, depth – the degree from which people are removed from regular life, weight – the psychological burden of a sanction and officers’ use of authority, and breadth – how a sanction “blurs boundaries between monitored and unmonitored lives” (Hucklesby et al., 2021) and affects those beyond the wearer. Similar to Crewe’s tight prison regimes, Hucklesby et al. found that many EM programs prevented clients from simply “doing time” and instead created an obligation to self-regulate in order to navigate strict, though often discretionary, sentence requirements.

On a broader level, Sexton (2015, p. 115) has pointed out that punishment is “something that is done to people and experienced by people”. As elaborated by Hayes (2018), even unintended or implicit consequences of a sanction, including those prior to or beyond the sentence itself, may be experienced as integrated parts of one’s punishment (see also Van Ginneken & Hayes, 2017). That is, the experience of punishment is highly subjective, and varies depending on how the criminal justice process interacts with one’s unique life circumstances. On EM, where the sanction itself is subject to clients’ at-home affairs, the level of experienced deprivation, or as termed by Canton (2018), “hard treatment,” may similarly vary considerably.

To make sense of how individuals may form differing pain experiences in similar material conditions, Sexton (2015) introduced their framework of penal consciousness. There, they suggest perceptions of penalty hinge on a punishment’s “salience” and “severity”. Salience, as Sexton describes, is the prominence of a punishment in one’s life. They contend this is contingent on the “punishment gap” of a person’s sanction – the difference between the expected and experienced level of punishment. Sexton found that people form expectations for their punishment based on their understanding of the justice system (see also Kirk, 2020) and/or the level of punishment they expect in an ideal sense, and that punishments that exceed these levels are experienced as especially difficult. The severity of a punishment, meanwhile, is described as the level to which it is seen as representative of symbolic or abstract pains. Deprivations interpreted as symbolic of stigma, dehumanization, or loss of personhood can be experienced as “punishment on top of punishment” (Sexton, 2015, p. 122) and thus also especially difficult. Penal consciousness suggests that even among “normal”, at-home conditions on EM, clients’ experiences of punishment are still shaped by their perceptions of its salience and severity.

Given this degree of subjectivity – and the proliferation of identified pains across the justice system – scholars have recognized a need to differentiate pains of varying severity (Haggerty & Bucerius, 2020), especially in identifying how these experiences may coexist alongside positive penal outcomes (McNeill, 2011). McNeill (2014) has noted that rehabilitative initiatives often shape punishment itself, thus under Christie’s (1981/2007) definition shaping pain-delivery. While McNeill elaborates there is therefore a need for rehabilitative measures to themselves be proportional in their implementation, this interplay suggests pain, defined broadly, as being inherent to the desistance process (Nugent & Schinkel, 2016), while in some contexts, painful prison sentences have been perceived as places of personal meaning and growth (Crewe & Ievins, 2019).

Drawing from medical literature, Todd-Kvam (2021) has proposed differentiating between pain and suffering. He suggests that pain constitutes suffering when it is associated with feelings of inescapability or hopelessness (Cassell, 1983), and when one’s response to punishment itself enacts further suffering, that is, “double suffering”, such as through self-stigma (Frost & Hoggett, 2008). However, pain experienced as controllable or finite, or as Todd-Kvam adds, meaningful, may avoid reaching this upper threshold.

Building on this theoretical framework, our analysis addresses three themes. First, we examine the frustrations associated with life on EM, and the degree to which these pains are caused by EM’s material environment, or instead, its “tightness”. Second, we identify how these pains are amplified (or mitigated) by their perceived salience and severity and how these perceptions are guided by the contours of EM in Norway. Third, we evaluate the degree to which pains on EM are experienced as suffering, and how this reflects upon EM’s potential as an alternative to imprisonment.

Methods

This study combines semi-structured interviews with clients serving sentences on EM with observational work shadowing EM-officers. Interviews were completed within two EM-offices in southeast Norway while observational work was completed in one office in southeast Norway and one in northern Norway. All interviews were completed in spare offices prior to or after clients’ weekly meetings. The interviews ranged in length from 31 to 80 min and focused on the purposes of serving a sentence through EM, perceived pains of the sanction, and experiences navigating daily life during its implementation. Before processing personal data, this project was reported to the Norwegian Data Protection Services for Research (Sikt-personvern), which provided assessment and assistance to ensure that the processing was in accordance with data protection legislation, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; project number 636189).

Any client serving a front-door EM sentence was eligible for recruitment. In all, 10 clients were interviewed. The average age and sentence length of the participants was 37 years old and 52 days respectively, ³ in comparison to national averages of 38 years old and 36 days (KDI, 2024b). About half of the 10 clients were arrested on DUI and traffic violations, while these charges make up ⅔ of the national target group. Nine of the 10 participants identified as men, compared to 85% of EM sentences which are served by men nationally (KDI, 2025b). The number of interviewees was subject to project time constraints, though also representative of the current scale of EM in Norway. In January 2025, when the interviews were completed, 346 individuals were actively serving sentences through EM (KDI, 2025a), with this number divided between the front-door implementation of focus and the NCS’ separate, back-door usage of EM. As such, our results are not intended to be representative of the full breadth of experience within Norway’s program, but to identify elements of punishment and pain in EM as perceived in the lives of those interviewed.

To contact those currently on EM, clients were recruited indirectly by EM-officers, who shared the opportunity to participate during weekly meetings. In this way, the research team was dependent on staff for recruitment, giving officers a “gatekeeper” role to who was informed about the project (Lundeberg & Johnsen, 2025). EM-officers therefore may have exhibited discretion in who they recruited. Officers may have chosen clients they felt were likely to give favorable feedback toward the EM-team (Abbott et al., 2018) or clients they had the strongest informal relationship with (Wanat, 2008). Clients for their part may have chosen to accept or reject completing an interview due to their relationships with EM-officers or in part due to an inherent power imbalance (Reeves, 2010).

Interviews were primarily conducted in English, though interviewees could request an interview in Norwegian if preferred. Eight of 10 client interviews were conducted in English. Population-wide, Norway has a high level of English proficiency, though such interviews are inherently limited when conducted outside of the interviewee’s primary language (Mathiesen, 2012, p. 13). Each interview was audio recorded and transcribed using noScribe and Microsoft Word, while interviews conducted in Norwegian were translated to English using DeepL. Translated transcripts were manually reviewed by Norwegian-speaking members of the research team to ensure uniformity of meaning. Following this process, the transcripts were thematically encoded using NVivo. Interviews were analyzed using deductive, top-down coding and inductive coding of emerging themes. Deductive coding was focused on literature-based concepts, including Sexton’s “salient” or “severe” pains and Todd-Kvam’s definitions of “pain” versus “suffering”. Inductive codes were later added corresponding with common themes of EM in a Norwegian context, including client concerns related to violating the breach policy and the application process to serve their sentence via EM.

The Experience of Serving a Prison Sentence Under Electronic Monitoring

Three themes emerged with clients in the EM program: (I) The experience of EM was one of punishment; (II) the salience of this punishment was conditional on clients’ expectations for their sentences; and (III) the severity with which punishment was experienced was contingent on perceived stigma or, conversely, experienced meaning or atonement. Across varying material conditions, those interviewed faced frustrations maintaining their routines and family lives, especially when compounded by other sanctions. The directionality of clients’ expectations though often pointed toward prison, seeming to as such ameliorate these pains. A small number of clients narrating self-stigma appear to experience suffering through EM, as distinguished from more finite forms of pain.

“All Those Small Things”: Navigating Daily Life

“I can’t go to the garbage bin when I want. So if my boy has a dirty diaper that smells a lot, I can’t go outside with it. And all those small things like I’m at the playground with him, and I have this amount of time to spend, and suddenly I have to explain to him, okay, I know you’re having fun now, but you have to go home” – Client 1

Under EM, most clients remained at their same jobs and residences and used their leave periods to spend time with friends and family. However, clients were still limited by their time schedule which required them to “plan everything”, as Client 1 lamented, and restricted simple freedoms. As Client 1 described, even tasks such as throwing out a dirty diaper meant leaving their set ankle bracelet radius, and thus required a level of advance coordination. Client 10 similarly detailed EM's restrictions:

If it’s snowing outside, I can’t shovel the snow. And I can’t go out with the trash. I can’t go to the mailbox without being allowed so it’s the small things I can’t do. And then I often sit by the window and see cars coming and [think], ‘Oh, it’s [the NCS] people coming to me’ . . . you can feel your home is [a prison] sometimes but now it actually is.

For Client 1 and Client 10, their inability to do the “small things” created a frustrating dimension of life under EM, even despite its allowances. Though they could spend time outside in a way that replicated freedom, if they got home late or left their house at the wrong time, these same “normal” activities would risk a sanction from the NCS. Like Shammas’ (2014) described “pains of freedom” in Norwegian open prisons, a similar confusion was at play on EM, a reality that prompted Client 10 to define their house under EM as like a prison.

The possibility of a breach sanction was omnipresent in clients’ lives and required vigilance to keep within one’s schedule. Client 10 described their routine, saying:

I must check my paper, ‘When can I go out? When can I go home?’ So it’s a little bit stressful I think . . . When I got [EM] I thought, ‘My god, I’m going to go out to the mailbox and not remember’.

Others, like Client 3, relied on people to drive them to work and keep them on time. This lack of control could produce its own anxieties:

When you lose your driver’s license as well, you have to trust someone else . . . The most difficult thing has to be that you may have to trust somebody else with the time or you have to call [the EM-office] and say I’m late or the person didn’t come and I have to find somebody else.

Underpinning this need for vigilance was the threat of a transfer to prison (see Durnescu, 2011). Even while EM-officers suggested a gradual approach to breach sanctions, except in the case of drug or alcohol violations, many clients’ expectations were, like Client 7, of “no mercy”. This caused some clients considerable anxiety. Client 10 feared forgetting the phone they were required to carry with them to work, saying that, at first, they felt like “someone’s watching me all the time”, while for Client 4, the effect was more severe:

Sometimes I don’t sleep, I’m often stressed. You’re always afraid that . . . did I oversleep? Am I going to jail? You will be afraid of making mistakes.

Though the breach policy did not affect the material conditions of EM, it still delivered pain via the “weight” of the authority the EM-office could impose (Hucklesby et al., 2021). Under EM, clients were accountable to their own schedules, and thus forced to build “inner bars” (Neumann, 2012) to adjust their lives to comply with EM’s restrictions. This resulting burden of self-regulation could, as identified by Hayes (2018), create pains not explicitly intended by the sentence’s terms. Client 3 faced anxiety about their limited control over their punctuality, while for Clients 4 and 10, the fear of breach respectively negatively affected their sleep and caused them to overestimate the level of surveillance they faced.

The burden of EM could stretch beyond preserving one’s own livelihood to those of others. As a result, clients used their leave time to fulfil family roles and reduce the “breadth” of their sentence, even as it simultaneously required more coordination on their part. For Client 1, the ability to do just this was their primary motivation on EM, saying they applied:

So [my son] doesn’t feel stressed out. He doesn’t deserve any problems with this. The best thing for him is he will not notice anything.

However, clients’ ability to minimize their sanction’s impact on others could be limited, especially when courts additionally imposed fines or compensation demands (see Todd-Kvam, 2019) and the loss of one’s driver’s license on top of EM. This was the case for Client 9, who, having lost their license, could no longer run a self-owned business. As a result, they relocated their family to a new home within walking distance of their new workplace. Fresh from the move, and also paying off a fine from their sentence, Client 9 conceded they were “just trying to sort the finances as much as possible until I can get my license back”. However, even as they complied with these rules, EM’s limit of working 45 hr a week reduced their ability to make up financial ground and affected their new job:

You can’t work more than 45 hours a week and I have employees under me who I can’t really manage now . . . I work at [job] with the technical things so [my boss and I] are the two who know how to run everything. So [now] they lost one, which is me. That entails a lot.

As they continued, these changes could also cause their family to experience stigma, even when they themselves did not:

I’m a very shameless guy, so I don’t really have any problems with it. My wife probably feels more towards it. Because I have the feeling that many people go through [EM] in their life.

As evidenced by Client 9, the “depth” clients faced on EM was often contingent on the degree of change from their preexisting living situations, a change that was not inherently implied by the sentence itself (Hucklesby, 2009; Rokkan, 2018). Contrasting Client 9’s experience was Client 2, who temporarily moved in with their parents while on EM:

I was able to have [EM] at my parents’ house, not my apartment. That’s like a house so it’s bigger so I don’t feel claustrophobic or anything. I would’ve if I was serving in my apartment though . . . [EM] hasn’t affected that much. It’s small. I’m still gaming with my friends online and my family’s visiting, my brothers and everyone.

At its most invasive, EM could separate clients’ from their means to reduce its negative effects, especially when compounded by other sanctions. However, this “hard treatment” varied – those like Client 2 with fewer familial obligations or greater social resources did not experience the same degree of disruption. Evidently, life on EM varied widely within the same regulatory parameters. What remained constant was that the “small things” on EM added up, and together, as they contributed to dimensions of tightness, created unique experiences of punishment.

“Happy News Out of Unhappiness”: EM Relative to Expectations of Punishment

My motivation [to apply for EM] was how this was going to impact our family life. How can I do it in a way that is minimal since I have two small kids? Even though we were prepared for the worst case anyways, [when] we got information that we could apply it was happy news out of unhappiness. -Client 6

Aligning with Sexton’s (2015) framework of penal consciousness, the salience of EM was contingent on clients’ expectations for their punishment. Since clients received an “unconditional prison sentence” following their trials, the punitiveness of EM often stood in contrast to the legal alternative of a stint in prison. For Client 6 above, who was not aware of the possibility of EM until they received an application letter from the NCS, EM stood out as a more lenient form of punishment than the “worst case” they had prepared for.

The application process provided a chance for clients to moderate the salience of EM by forming accurate expectations of the sentence to come (see Laursen et al., 2020). Clients gathered information about the program through online sources or spoke with friends or family who themselves had been on EM. In addition, clients reported being well advised by the EM-office itself. However, this preparation had its limits. While for Client 9, speaking to friends before their sentence meant that EM was “not really [different] at all” from their expectations, for Client 1, starting EM still caused a shock:

The first day was hard. It wasn’t so bad it was just a feeling that, fuck this is real now, even [with] how much you can prepare for it. And this is a small thing . . . But the other side is it’s better than going to prison. That’s the most important thing for me to think. Okay, yeah, sometimes it’s shit when the train is 15 minutes late and I have to run from the train station to catch the bus. But come on, that’s nothing. Instead, it’s going to prison. You compare.

For Client 1, starting EM, their first criminal sentence, was initially more painful than what they had prepared for. This “plummet” could be its own type of pain – Crewe (2025) notes pain in prison as relative to how “normal” imprisonment feels, while Kirk (2020) identifies stigma perceived on EM as relative to how normalized the sentence is in one’s communities. Contrasted with Client 9, who had friends who had gone through similar experiences, Client 1 had less to draw upon when shaping their expectations. Client 6, who also was serving their first sentence, expressed a similar sentiment upon receiving EM:

It was quite surreal for me. To [go] through the whole process is surreal. Because again, you never imagined that in some years you got charges.

However, Client 1 still noted that their frustrations from EM, like navigating public transit to make their time schedule, were not as bad as the alternative of prison. In this way, unlike other open penal environments (Payne & Gainey, 1998; Shammas, 2014), the directionality of clients’ expectations were not pointed toward the free people around them, à la the “watching others effect”. Instead, expectations were directed in the opposite direction: those in a closed prison – an “avoiding prison effect”. Client 1 and Client 6 also stated that their EM sentences became easier over time, a sentiment echoed by all clients interviewed. Clients actively adjusted, and moderated, their expectations of punishment throughout their time on EM (see Bronsteen et al., 2009).

This relativity also hinged on the symbolism identified by clients who were granted EM. Client 7 said EM helped them keep a “self-confidence” they may not have maintained in prison, while for Client 5, being granted EM stood not just in contrast to a Norwegian prison, but their previous prison experience in the country they immigrated to Norway from. Asked if their sentence had changed their views of the justice system, they explained:

Actually I like the government more than before. Because I [was] doing something wrong so I deserve it. And I think EM is very nice and helps me. Maybe somebody in another country [if] you’re doing something wrong it’s not so helpful. Norway is a nice country . . . Maybe for [a] Norwegian guy this is more difficult [but] in my life, I’ve seen a much [larger] problem before. So this is very easy for me.

As suggested by Neumann (2012), the social contexts of punishment matter. For Client 5, comparing EM to a previous, more punitive, prison experience meant EM was far less salient. Their quote also suggested a level of penal acceptance – something echoed by other clients. Most clients said there was “nothing” they would change about EM while some said that EM had no downsides at all, despite clients unanimously reporting frustrations during their sentence. Clients’ experiences thus went beyond an aggregation of individual pains and instead reflected how these pains related to an expected, and accepted, sanction.

Interestingly, Clients 4 and 9 also experienced EM as lenient, even as they simultaneously expressed deep dissatisfaction with their court processes. Client 9 expressed frustration with Norway’s DUI laws for marijuana usage, which led to them being convicted despite their claim they had smoked 48 hr before being pulled over. Meanwhile, Client 4 discussed frustration with the speed of their day in court, saying:

And they haven’t, like, really put themselves into the case. They just make it easy to just put you in jail or something . . . People go through so much and you have to prepare so much, and they still can do [it] so fast. Like the court was 4 hours, I prepared 2 ½ years.

However, as they described being approved for EM, they took on a far different tone. Client 4 shared “You can speak to [the EM-officers] and they understand. I talked to this office and I told them my story and they believed me. And they gave me the opportunity” while Client 9 said that by being given EM, “you are being shown some charity after being sentenced to prison . . . you probably won’t get the same chance next time”.

These perspectives point to a nuancing of the roles of the court and NCS. Even when court processes were experienced as a miscarriage of justice, the NCS, as a review body for clients’ EM-applications, and EM-officers, as representatives of the NCS, could still positively contribute to the legitimacy with which clients viewed their sentences (Lundeberg, 2017). That the granting of EM is an administrative, rather than judicial, decision in Norway is relatively unique, and among those interviewed, meant receiving EM could be seen as “charity”, or at least better than prison.

“A Psychological Punishment”: Shame, Suffering, and Moving Forward

When you have this bracelet, in advance before you start, you punish yourself. And when you are in the process, you punish yourself. And after I think you punish yourself because you are so ashamed. You feel embarrassed. You don’t look people in the eye. This bracelet is a psychological punishment in many dimensions, it’s easier than jail, but it’s psychologically heavy. -Client 4

EM could be painful in ways that were entirely removed from one’s material conditions. The shock of a conviction, the legal labelling of being a criminal, and the stigma of battling “invisible stripes” (LeBel, 2012) both real and perceived could create particularly difficult experiences. For Client 4, the shame they perceived was beyond EM’s relativity to prison. Yes, they perceived EM as easier than prison, but a sentence on EM was still one in which some of their punishment was, as described, self-inflicted. Specifically, the labelling of “criminal” could be particularly painful to clients, both in how clients interpreted their trial experiences and in how clients navigated social ties. For Client 10, the legal reaction resulting from their trial formed the worst part of their punishment:

I have been open about the [ankle bracelet] to everybody around me. But the system has judged me very much. Driving one time with alcohol and [having] never done something wrong in my life. So the system is judging me, not the people . . . It’s the system who sets you in a ball and, there, you are a criminal. That is the worst part of it.

As Sexton (2015) affirms, the severity of punishment may depend on the level of abstraction at which punishment is experienced. For Client 10, this meant being deemed other, or “criminal”, because of their offense. However, Client 10 contrasted their court experience to that of disclosing their sentence to their boss, who they said, “knows me as a human”, and thus showed empathy for their mistake.

For others, revealing their EM status could be more difficult. Client 4 was laid off from their job after disclosing their sentence, something they attributed to the fact that “people are very scared of convicts and dealing with them”, and that their workplace did not want to act as a liaison for surveillance with the EM-office. In this way, EM as an alternative to prison was limited in its ability to reduce the consequences of stigma – avoiding prison could not prevent the professional consequences of one’s offense. Fearing a similar reaction, Client 6 chose not to disclose their pending sentence at all during the hiring process for a job they began shortly before EM:

It was quite a struggle because you never know how honest you should be. Because most likely they are just going to say, ‘Okay, pass, we have many other candidates without a dark story’ . . . When I told my supervisor that I’m going through [EM], of course they got curious and a little bit disappointed . . . they just went, ‘Why couldn’t you tell us before?’ My answer was basically just, ‘What would you do if you were wearing my shoes?’

Knowing their sentence was approaching, Client 6 had to weigh the potential consequences of their pending “forced relationship” (Staples & Decker, 2009). To feel “known as a human”, as Client 10 expressed, Client 6 decided it was best not to lead with their offense. This type of calculus could extend to outside of the workplace as well. Though clients often wore pants that covered their ankle bracelet, and therefore mostly did not fear stigma from strangers, those interviewed had different approaches with their friends. Having said they also lost their partner after telling them about their offense, Client 4 reported self-isolating out of fear of further stigma. They said:

I’m more protective like I don’t share anything. You mostly isolate yourself. You are taking a distance from society, people, groups . . . You don’t want any attention.

Todd-Kvam (2021), discussing when pain entails suffering, cited Frost and Hoggett (2008), who defined double suffering as reactions to suffering that, in themselves, cause further suffering. Client 4, having experienced stigma from EM, further imposed pain on themselves by self-isolating, while, as evidenced by their expressed shame, also potentially exhibited self-stigma. Their pain on EM was not from its physical limitations but from when, as they stated above, “you punish yourself”.

One arena that stood in contrast to this stigma, and could reduce the severity of EM, was clients’ interactions with EM-officers. Clients unanimously gave positive feedback about the officers, highlighting their communication, flexibility, and particularly, their humanity. As Client 2 described the officer they met with most often, “he understands what we’re going through and trying to cope with. He doesn’t look down on you, he’s still like [an] equal”. Even Client 4, despite the self-imposed nature of their punishment, said that they appreciated that officers had, “met many people like me in this same situation”. While clients occasionally wished for more help – Client 4 stated a desire for more “professionalized” emotional support – it was evident that officers could interact with clients without reinforcing stigma, and thus ameliorate the “survivability” (Liebling, 2011) of their sentences.

Clients’ punishments could also be moderated by an understanding that EM was a part of moving forward after their offense. Though Client 7 experienced “a little bit of torment” on EM, it also prompted them to act on their goal of getting back in the workforce:

I know that you can’t just sit down, let go of everything you have left . . . I realized that, okay, I have to try to do things . . . And that was what I said to [the EM-office], that I really want to get a job where I can possibly have an opportunity to get some work in the future . . . and maybe build some bridges in some way, so that I have something to contribute.

Other clients, interviewed during the final days of their sentence, interpreted their restrictions as helpful to their future, or as an inflection point for enacting positive change. Client 1 said that though they were not a routine person, being forced to build one around their schedule was good for them. Also in their last week, Client 2 interpreted EM as a launchpad for their future, though with some trepidation about their release:

You begin to like, see things clear [on EM]. So, just to apply for jobs was like not something you were dreading. After you have done some tasks you are proud of yourself. And it was easier to do those tasks than beforehand, applying to jobs and reconnecting with the family and everything . . . Just not hoping for like the relapse when it’s over. That’s also something you have to plan for, what you’re going to do after the bracelet is off.

So, just as the severity of punishment on EM could be enhanced by procedural unfairness or stigma, so too could it be reduced by perceived meaning in those sentence terms, at least as one’s sentence was coming to a close.

Discussion and Concluding Thoughts

Clients in Norway’s EM program encountered a wide range of experiences from the inconvenient to, for some, the profoundly shameful. Christie (1981/2007) argues that pain and punishment are closely bound up in one another, and this applies to EM in Norway. The experience of EM was one of punishment, with pains driven by overarching experiences of tightness (Hucklesby et al., 2021) compounded by the weight of an omnipresent breach policy, the breadth of others impacted by one’s sentence, and the depth of the “plummet” from one’s unmonitored life. The blurring of free and non-free roles, a distinction that clients themselves were expected to uphold (Neumann, 2012; Shammas, 2014), created further frustrations through the “small things” clients could not do, despite their physical proximity.

The intensity with which these pains were experienced, however, depended on clients’ expectations for their sentences (Sexton, 2015). On EM, this often meant that experiences were shaped by the program’s interconnectedness with prison. For many, since EM was perceived as more lenient than imprisonment, this made their resulting punishment less salient. The directionality of these expectations, toward those in prison rather than those living in freedom, was contrary to the “watching others effect” observed by Payne and Gainey (1998), and instead created an “avoiding prison effect”. EM’s relativity to prison also guided the severity with which clients interpreted their punishments. As Client 5 suggested, receiving an EM sentence could be proof of Norway as a “nice country”. This too suggests an “avoiding prison effect”. While clients who perceived stigma experienced their punishment as more difficult, those who interpreted EM as symbolically lenient appear to have experienced it as less severe.

One explanation for this distinction lies in EM’s use as a penal alternative, rather than as a penal additive. In Norway’s system of indefinite post-conviction detention, forvaring, clients released on parole often experienced supervision as more painful than expected, and at times even worse than prison, because they overestimated their level of freedom under additive control measures such as curfews and drug and alcohol testing (Bjørneboe et al., 2025). In contrast, though clients on EM were subjected to similar measures, they tended to evaluate their experience against the alternative of prison that EM replaced. While those on forvaring experienced a “punishment gap” (Sexton, 2015) created by unmet expectations of freedom, those on EM – who at times were not even aware of the program’s existence until they received their application letter – experienced the same restrictions as less painful than anticipated for a “prison” sentence. In this manner, neither the “watching others effect” nor the “avoiding prison effect” are inherent to EM itself. Instead, these dynamics depend on how EM is placed in the justice system, and how this placement shapes client penal consciousness. In Norway, this distinction may also be influenced by the NCS’ role as a separate, administrative body responsible for approving clients’ EM applications. Compared to the court system which imposed clients’ sanctions, officers were largely perceived as benevolent actors, who through their support contributed to the legitimacy with which clients perceived their sanctions.

Todd-Kvam’s (2021) differentiation between pain and suffering may give further insight into why EM sentences were not always especially difficult penal experiences. Through his framework, the pains of EM were often perceived as finite, controllable, and sometimes, meaningful. Serving sentences that on average lasted just over a month, clients adjusted to their restrictions over time and established new routines within their weekly schedules. Others saw EM as having positive effects or falling within a bound of acceptable recourse for their offense. As such, the pains of EM, while present across clients' lives, did not necessarily interact in an aggregate sense. Pain on EM, however, could constitute suffering. This was largely realized through the experience of Client 4, who discussed self-stigma and subsequent self-isolation throughout their sentence. Notably, in their case, many aspects of the program were “right”. They expressed positive experiences with EM-officers and described EM as preferable to prison – yet they experienced suffering nonetheless. EM may therefore, despite its broader effectiveness, inherently create the potential for suffering to occur.

The experience of Client 4 and others highlight concerns raised by Kirk-Werner (2025) regarding the APPA’s claim that EM is not an inherently punitive sanction. As they identify, the punitive impacts of a criminal justice process shouldn’t be obscured by its penological intentions (Kirk-Werner, 2025, p. 183); even as a penal alternative, the pain of EM was not limited to its deprivation of liberty. Instead, pains emerged within highly personal contexts. To this end, some have identified that bringing sentencing into the community may create class-based hierarchies of hard treatment (Todd-Kvam, 2023). Some clients may have the financial or social capital to mitigate EM’s effects, while for others, its effects may be more disruptive. Thus, to claim EM is not inherently punitive would be to ignore the personal contexts the sanction is intended to preserve.

In evaluating EM as a penal alternative, Kirk (2020) has also warned against “carceral logics” that promote EM as an objectively lenient sanction. They identify that EM may be deemed lenient not because it is not significantly disruptive or uniquely painful, but because it is often the only way to avoid imprisonment. The challenge, therefore, with EM is to weigh its finite, meaningful pains – as well as its potential for suffering – on their own merits. In Norway, where EM has largely replaced short-term imprisonment, future analysis of the program must consider this previous correctional geography amidst related discourses of Scandinavian exceptionalism.

Norway’s EM program has enabled wide-scale decarceration while operating primarily as a penal alternative. Yet, clients’ experiences of punishment remain guided by the expectations and symbolism associated with EM. While pains experienced as inescapable and self-replicating may escalate into suffering, those experienced as finite and meaningful do not. Thus, the question is not whether EM is “punishment enough”, but, in recognizing its punitiveness, identifying how it can best shape the processes of future change and desistance.