Page 89 - 111111

¥ÿ≈æ“À

more effective system for ensuring that offenders appear for scheduled court

appearances.

Keywords: EM Bail; Thailand Criminal Justice System

I. Introduction

Electronic monitoring (EM) devices can be used by different criminal

justice agencies and can serve rehabilitative, retributive, deterrent and public
protection purposes (Nellis 2015:16). This article critically evaluates the

experience of Thailand in using EM as a condition of bail and illustrates, apart

from widely discussed purposes, that EM can be used to serve another
purposefireducing inequality in the money bail system. Drawing from the

firsthand experience of the author as the executive of the office that planned

and operated the project, the article describes how the EM bail project in

Thailand was planned and implemented, critically analyzes the self-evaluation

report of the project, and recommends lessons learned from the project that
point to ways in which such efforts may be improved upon.

II. A Brief History of the Use of EM in the Thai Criminal

Justice System

Thai criminal justice scholars have studied the idea of using EM to

reduce prison population for many decades, but it was only at the end of 2013

that the Department of Probation of Thailand started piloting EM as a

condition of probation order, in drunk driving and illegal racing cases

(Yampracha, 2015:815-816). Although RF technology was initially used in the
first pilot project, the Department soon adopted the more convenient GPS.

78
78 ‡≈à¡∑’Ë Ú ªï∑’Ë ˆˆ
78
78
78