About Iain Johnston
Consultancies are only as good as their depth of experience and how they apply that experience. Monetor is fortunate in having an unrivalled depth of experience in the formation and development of new electronic monitoring programmes.
Monetor was founded by Iain Johnston. He has a wide and extensive experience within criminal justice fairly uniquely encompassing both the public and private sectors at senior levels. He commenced his career in the Scottish Probation service and before moving to the BBC, was Assistant Chief Probation Officer within the UK’s second largest service.
He oversaw the adoption of pioneering objective standards in the service. This included specific aims and objectives being set for each offender and more vitally embedding the need to ensure that the service made an impact – on reoffending and public safety – together with the promotion of change by the offender.
During this time, he completed his Master’s in Business Administration at Strathclyde University and a subsequent Masters in Criminal Justice from Edinburgh/Stirling University. This added to his BA in Sociology and CQSW in Social Work from NE London Polytechnic.
Whilst managing information and technology services at the BBC he was approached by General Security Services Corporation (GSSC). At the time they managed one of the largest electronic monitoring programmes in the USA. Following a competitive tender, they were asked by the Scottish Government to implement a pilot programme to examine the feasibility of monitoring offenders sentenced to curfew restrictions as a Court punishment.
Iain left the BBC to become Director of this programme in June 1998. This was the first substantive service in the UK and one of the earliest outside of the USA. This pilot ultimately provided the necessary confidence and evidence to the Scottish jurisdiction that EM was a very welcome and important new approach to the management of offenders within the community.
Four years after the introduction of the pilot Iain and his team won the first national embedded electronic monitoring service for all of Scotland. With GSSC Iain was also the Director of the first national programme within England and Wales.
Iain left to develop Monetor as a consultancy vehicle, and to position it as a trusted and effective partner in this then embryonic business. This has included one year leading the introduction of Community Detention throughout the length and breadth of New Zealand and developing it into the largest pro-capita services anywhere. Monetor has also been commissioned to develop a feasibility and strategy papers - a series of these were produced and presented to the Solicitor General of Nigeria – in addition to policy proposals for the Governor of Bayelsa province.