Abstract
The mounting criticism of at least one area of outsourcing of criminal justice (the probation service in England and Wales) to the private sector makes this important collection of essays highly topical. The eight contributions, together with an overview from the editors, cover the main areas in which the private sector is currently involved: policing; prisons; probation; and the electronic monitoring of offenders.
The opening chapter by the American radical criminologist Robert Weiss provides a promising start. Besides a succinct account of the history of the private criminal justice sector in the USA, Weiss poses key issues for social theory: ‘How does the commodification of force affect democratic governance? Does commodified criminal justice expand or diminish the powers of the state? […] is sovereignty itself being outsourced?’ (p. 24). He also emphasizes the expanding role and power of the Information Technology sector in regimes of surveillance, and in blurring the boundaries between public and private power such that: in many cases it has become very difficult to determine who is controlling whom […] the boundary between private and public spheres of surveillance has nearly vanished under neoliberal governance with private firms engaged in sovereign functions and public entities functioning as extensions of the market. (p. 38)
It is not unfair to evaluate the subsequent chapters from the standpoint of the adequacy of their discussion of these issues.
The most direct response comes from the two chapters, by Anthea Hucklesby and Mike Nellis respectively, on the electronic monitoring of offenders. Both chapters stress the way in which the private technology providers have themselves been able to determine the mode of operation of the monitoring process. Thus Hucklesby points out that the nature of expanded monitoring privileges the police as the controlling agency because only they—unlike prisons and probation—have the infrastructure necessary to handle a 24/7 dispersed monitoring operation. Nellis focuses usefully on the dynamics of the outsourcing process itself and the general incompetence of the Ministry of Justice by comparison to the technology companies in the process of contract negotiation. He echoes Weiss’s point that it is often difficult to know who is controlling whom.
Adam White, in one of two discussions on private policing, responds to the question of the outsourcing of sovereignty itself to private agencies by describing the opposition of the private security industry to proposals for the abolition of government regulation of the sector. Regulation, by separating out the ‘cowboys’ from the large accredited security companies helps to give the latter a state-like status and provide a means of confronting the ‘deeply embedded public expectation that domestic security ought to be delivered exclusively by the state’ (p. 89).
A second strategy of attempting to legitimize private authority is by the state itself through the delegation of (sub-sets of) police powers to private security, expanding the well-established traditions of enforcement of local byelaws. Rick Sarre and Tim Prenzler in their chapter examine how such public–private policing partnerships have expanded relatively smoothly, in terms of public acceptability, in Australia. Mark Button and Alison Wakefield focus their chapter on a less discussed variety of this theme in England, the expansion of employer financing of Special Constables. But they also remark on the Community Safety Accreditation Schemes which, since 2002, have enabled some police powers to be accredited to private security agents acting in public spaces.
Button and Wakefield underline a paradox: on the one hand ‘it is surprising that there has been little controversy surrounding the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme given that it involves the potential for private security officers to secure special statutory powers’ (p. 137). But, on the other hand, ‘profit-making is widely seen as being incompatible with the ideals of impartial justice and universal service intrinsic to modern policing’ (p. 156). At some point these two collide and how that collision is avoided is an important question. The discussion could, for example, have been extended to cover some of the important dynamics of social structure and culture in neoliberal societies at work. For example, the weakening of notions of shared citizenship, linking individuals to forms of legitimate state authority, may have been displaced by notions of security—of the middle classes against the marginalized underclass—more amenable to treatment as a commercial commodity like any other.
The chapters on prisons and probation raise different questions insofar as they are dealing not with the general public, but with ‘captive’ populations of sentenced individuals already in the hands of the state. In this sector questions of outsourcing might be expected to be discussed much more unproblematically from the standpoint of efficiency. But Alison Liebling and Ben Crewe, in a further interrogation of their rich data on the working of private prisons, unearth further issues such as the greater professional competence of public sector prison staff and, most interestingly, the way in which the greater malleability of private sector prison staff may work both for and against the quality and legitimacy of the prison regime.
Jane Dominey and Lorraine Gelsthorpe explore the impact of the partly privatized nature of English and Welsh probation and pose the key question hanging now over the future of the privatized sector of ‘how a culture in which offenders are seen as people will be maintained’ (p. 216). Like the professionalism of public sector prison officers discussed by Liebling and Crewe, the continuation of the welfarist/professional tradition of the probation service is dependent on the substantial number of previously trained practitioners continuing to work for a private sector which sees their expertise as costly and unnecessary. The survival of a culture which treats offenders as people in need of help as well as punishment, either in prison or on probation again relates to the wider political changes concerning the decline in the idea of shared citizenship. If sentenced offenders are no longer ‘conditional citizens’ in need of rehabilitation but simply risks to be managed in the interests of public protection, then treating offenders as people is less important and, indeed, a waste of resources. These fundamental social and political issues get rather less treatment in the collection than perhaps they might. Yet they are arguably the key to understanding why privatization has become so prominent.
There is, furthermore, a tendency to look at the private sector from the standpoint of the public sector whose activities it is partially taking over. As Dominey and Gelsthorpe admit, we still know too little about the internal workings of private companies. Many are linked, through complex chains of ownership, to some of the largest sectors of global capital and finance, and share with those sectors strategies of world-wide business legitimacy and ‘state-like’ authority. This is particularly so in the global South where governments in general and criminal justice systems in particular are weaker (see Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011). But, stronger states like the UK, should not feel in any way immune in the long term.
To conclude, this collection continues to raise questions about, and reinforce the importance of, scrutinizing the role of private companies in criminal justice provision. The Private Sector and Criminal Justice is, therefore, to be welcomed as a timely contribution to ongoing debates in this field.