Abstract
The encroach of markets on social and economic domains previously considered ‘sacred’ is such that, over the course of a generation, their influence has become normalised. Criminal justice institutions, their structures, actors, processes, and modes of accountability, have not been spared from such change. And yet, as Albertson, Corcoran, and Phillips, editors of this important and timely collection, remind us, there is no one way to marketise and privatise; rather, attempts to utilise (quasi-)markets to pursue ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’ have resulted in myriad arrangements that are specific to services, sectors, and jurisdictions. The editors’ accomplishment is an illuminating volume which discusses, from diverse theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, the consequences of marketisation and privatisation in criminal justice.
The book is organised into four parts. The first situates marketisation and privatisation within various theoretical frameworks. Corcoran sets the tone in Chapter 1; she explores the intellectual roots of neoliberalism, the political economic philosophy that has driven marketisation and privatisation in criminal justice. Fox and Albertson (Chapters 2 and 5) note the difficulties of measuring, evaluating, and valuing outcomes-based contracts to fund public services, in which providers’ pay is (partially) linked to results. They conclude that there is no evidence to suggest that marketisation incentivises offender rehabilitation, especially when set against the backdrop of austerity. The Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms to probation services in England and Wales are the focus of Chapter 4. Phillips deploys Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’ to explore how probation practitioner values did not (fully) evolve with political demands for a service that was at once punitive and efficient. The resultant legitimacy deficit thus stripped the service of the language and political influence required to resist privatisation.
Part II reflects upon experiences of marketisation. Swirak (Chapter 6) highlights how the marketisation of Irish Youth Justice work has reconfigured workers’ constructions of young offenders along neoliberal lines of individual responsibility. Chapters 7 and 8 turn to policing. For Dehaghani and White, police custody suites are characterised by staff vulnerabilities related to the complexity of detainees, lack of resources and training, and feelings of over-scrutiny. Outsourcing such work exposes further vulnerabilities in terms of professional identity, unwanted media attention, and detainees’ prejudiced views on the legitimacy of the private sector. No such outsourcing, as Walby and Lippert (Chapter 8) note, is present in Canadian and US policing; but ‘corporatisation’ is increasing through ‘police foundations’ (charitable entities which attract private finance to help resource police services) and ‘user pays’ policing, in which the services of uniformed officers are sold to staff private events.
The remaining chapters in Part II address how the moral element of criminal justice work is obscured by marketised practices that prioritise efficiency and accountability over relationships, demonstrated through case studies of legal aid (Chapter 9), prison Controllers and Directors (Chapter 10), and Community Justice Courts (Chapter 11). The search for efficiencies is also a recurring theme in Part III, which focuses on voluntary sector involvement in criminal justice. Each chapter emphasises how the marketisation of the penal voluntary sector both predates and has been intensified by the politics of austerity. TR, unsurprisingly, features prominently. Nowhere are the reforms’ ruinous consequences more apparent than in services for women, which have suffered from decreases in funding and a lack of strategic intent (Chapter 13). ‘Market imaginaries’ (Corcoran et al.; Chapter 14) – the ways in which actors responsible for shaping strategy understand their role through the language of the market – are thus crucial to how senior penal voluntary sector personnel make sense of their work.
Part IV looks beyond criminal justice institutions. Bhatia and Canning (Chapter 16) argue, powerfully, for the abolition of immigration detention, for an end to ‘profit gained from migrant misery’ (p. 269). Czerniawski (Chapter 17) focuses on prisoner education, which, despite the benefits, is often sacrificed to penal populism. In England and Wales, this creates a ‘wicked problem’ in that privatised prisoner education suffers from concerns about the perceived cost to taxpayers and a narrow focus on ‘employability’. Tombs (Chapter 18) thus taps into the paradox at the heart of the chapters in this collection: that, in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2007/08, a crisis born of free markets and a lack of regulation, we have witnessed an intensification of deregulation, marketisation, and privatisation across the public sector.
Albertson, Corcoran, and Phillips’s conclusion brings the contributions together to hold marketisation and privatisation to account on their own terms: competition, accountability, responsibilisation, and innovation. They demonstrate how, to borrow Nellis’s phrase from Chapter 15 (p. 253), ‘unforeseen (if foreseeable) difficulties’ stemming from market discourses, objectives, and techniques have reshaped cultural practices beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of prisons and probation. Accordingly, in addition to scholars and students of political economy, social policy, and criminal justice, the book will engage myriad professionals (whether employed in, or between, the public or private sector) who will surely find parallels between their work and other occupations. The message is of the failure of ‘transactional’ approaches to criminal justice, but also of hope that we can move beyond marketisation and privatisation to (re)capture ‘relational’ modes of working that serve the interests of providers, practitioners, and service users - a valuable lesson, in particular, for the next iteration of probation services.