Abstract
For anyone wishing to better understand the contemporary politics of welfare and justice, this is both a timely and thoroughly engaging book. Its timing could not be better as the next part of the Coalition’s neoliberal putsch against all things collective is now focused on the privatization of nearly all things probation. This is happening in the context of the withdrawal of state services to the most vulnerable, a vicious assault on welfare benefits and the systematic vilification of the poor − done in the name of austerity.
So if you think that we are not all in this together, this set of essays may refresh, stimulate and provide a critical and analytical overview of what neoliberalism really means. The editors, Philip Whitehead and Paul Crawshaw, provide in their introductory chapter what they refer to as a Preliminary Mapping of the Terrain – somewhat dense but an interesting and helpful historical overview that also contains useful chapter summaries. These are needed because the overall content is extremely wide ranging as the text takes in, for example, a fascinating analysis in chapter four of the cigarette counterfeiting business and economic development in the People’s Republic of China, to chapter eight, which examines neoliberal policy, quality and inequality in undergraduate degrees.
The key contention of the book is that neoliberalism is not just an ideology but a transformation of ideology ‘as it is generated not from the state or a dominant social class, but from the experience of buying and selling commodities from the market place’ (p. 3). It ultimately becomes an unchallenged force within contemporary political economies and operates not just at the macro level but within the organizational structures that workers inhabit – it becomes the common sense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world – ultimately ideology become neutral.
Probation practitioners will probably be initially drawn to the early substantive chapters of the book. In ‘Neoliberalism and Crime in the United States and the United Kingdom’, Mark Cowling provides an excellent summary of liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism that will assist the reader who is unfamiliar with the terrain, and he concludes with reflections of the relationship between neoliberalism and both incarceration and crime. This debate and analysis is continued by Mike Teague in the next chapter – ‘Neoliberalism, Prisons and Probation in the United States and England and Wales’. Readers will already be familiar with Teague’s excellent article in the December 2011 special edition of the Probation Journal (Teague, 2011) and he builds on that work to locate the experience of both probation and prisons within an ascendant neoliberal ideology. Teague provides some truly shocking statistics on the rates of incarceration in the United States and concludes that: we can no longer view the growing privatisation of correctional services in the United States or England and Wales as experimental. The predominance of neoliberal political economy and the pervasiveness of neoliberal culture have supported the punitive turn and have ensured that privatisation has put down firm roots, thus integrating criminal justice and penal policy into the circuits of capitalist production and accumulation. (p. 70)
Thus, we live in an unreal world of expanding control over and segmentation of more and more citizens while the crime rate drops and the profits of the multinationals increase (surely some mistake!!).
While these two chapters may be more easily absorbed by readers knowledgeable of and experienced in the criminal justice system, there is much of interest in the remaining chapters and Philip Whitehead’s (penultimate) chapter on ‘Religion and Criminal Justice’, raises the potential for the religious and voluntary sector to challenge or at least influence neoliberal orthodoxy (echoes here of where probation came in, at the later end of the Victorian period?).
In their concluding chapter, Whitehead and Crawshaw admit that it is often easier to analyse and conceptualize than to act and change in the context of such a complex set of ideological considerations and relationships. The authors argue that neoliberalism fundamentally transmutes the dynamics of social encounters between human beings when the pursuit of profit takes precedence over the quality of service and that ‘essentially, neoliberalism is the elevation of individual self-interest over collective responsibility and social welfare’ (p. 238). They call upon Giddens to assert that institutionalizing neoliberalism within organizational formations ‘reduces all human qualities to quantitative values of exchange’ (p. 235).
What the contributors to this book bring home is that the pernicious effect of neoliberalism does not just happen at the global level, across the economies of nation states or within its social institutions, but that its all-pervasive ideology (or rather common sense as ideology) creates individuals – you and me − in its own likeness, sometimes as customers, sometimes as providers, in a world of competition where value is roundly expressed in monetary terms. Understanding this better, with the help of this collection, is a first step, resistance is the next.