Prison privatisation and normalisation in the neoliberal State: between dispersal of decency and diffusion of duty

Hamerton, Christopher and Hobbs, Suzanne (2022) Prison privatisation and normalisation in the neoliberal State: between dispersal of decency and diffusion of duty. In, Privatising Criminal Justice: History, Neoliberal Penality and the Commodification of Crime. 1st ed. Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 197-227. (doi:10.4324/9781315709819-9).

Abstract

Chapter 9 follows on from and builds on the content of Chapter 8 in mapping the development of privatisation within the prison system of the United Kingdom. It does this by chronologically exploring four overlapping intensive phases of criminal justice policy, covering the last 40 years in critical overview. The first considers aspects of the ideological justification for the use of competition as a tool of penal reform in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ensuing clamour for its adoption and its formal realisation as government policy under the Conservatives. The second explores the rapid manufacture and public acceptance of a private prison complex under the Major administrations at the start of the 1990s—a move which conceptually owed much to the American model but was supplied with a distinctly British flavour. The third phase evaluates the response of a succession of Blairite Labour governments between 1997 and 2010, firmly against penal privatisation in opposition but shown to be exacting neoliberalists in governance. Finally, the last decade is scrutinised, a period framed by austerity and intense social change, where normalised penal privatisation went beyond rationalisation towards a culture of denigration and drift.

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Contributors

Author: Christopher Hamerton

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