Prison privatisation and the foundation of public privilege

Hamerton, Christopher and Hobbs, Suzanne (2022) Prison privatisation and the foundation of public privilege. In, Privatising Criminal Justice: History, Neoliberal Penality and the Commodification of Crime. 1st ed. Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 167-194. (doi:10.4324/9781315709819-8).

Abstract

Chapter 8 attempts to utilise the history of punishment and imprisonment to inform the present, linking explicitly to the chapter that immediately follows, which critically considers the contemporary penal landscape. Its focus is primarily on the United Kingdom, though continental and American historical models are utilised where relevant. The chapter commences with an examination of symbolic punitive custom in the early modern period to demonstrate the dramatic impact of social change and the move from corporal punishment towards formalised incapacitation. Growing public awareness and fear of crime, the resultant demand for discipline and the development of corrective technologies are explored, alongside the inherent profit imperatives and structures of early organised penality. As the central State became involved with plans for prison design, construction and reform and aware of the associated costs—fiscal, political and social—a modern concept of the prison emerges. It is argued that a turning point is reached in the early nineteenth century with an evolving desire towards bureaucratic formalism, coherent rationale and centralised control. The chapter then develops to reveal the construction of what might be termed a ‘public edifice’ through various regimes and representations during the Victorian era, to emerge as a model of purpose for modern public penality up until the middle of the twentieth century. Conceptions of idealistic decay and administrative idealism, essentially the deterioration and degradation of the public edifice, are discussed, with the move towards the muted surrender of public sovereignty and control at the commencement of the final decade of the twentieth century.

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Contributors

Author: Christopher Hamerton

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