Britain’s penny-pinching panopticon

Were a filmmaker looking for a location to shoot a dystopian thriller, they could do worse than choose the Ministry of Justice’s Westminster offices. 102 Petty France, a brutalist masterpiece, looks like the sort of place Winston Smith might have waited for his appointment in Room 101. It seems appropriate, then, that this forbidding building is the birthplace of the Government’s new 2026 Sentencing Act, introducing “restriction zones” for offenders. Creating a kind of digital panopticon using geofencing technology, GPS-tagged offenders will be expected to comply with strict geographical boundaries, preventing them from harassing or accidentally encountering their victims. This, the Government claims, offers bespoke protection for individuals while mitigating the risks presented by prison