Privatising Justice: The Security Industry, War and Crime Control

by John Lea (Author), Wendy Fitzgibbon (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2020

  $32.86

  Privatising Justice examines the accelerated privatisation of the criminal justice system, to show how the character of the private-state is not a journey of modernising, but a complete reversal of previous economic tendencies.
  
  The dynamics of neoliberalism - the successor to the Keynesian welfare state - are surveyed through an examination of the probation service, the police service and prisons. The growth in the private policing of public space, as well as the changes within the traditional criminal justice agencies, provide an opportunity to theorise changes in the politico-economic order and locate them within global economic, social and political structures. The anachronism of the security industry is hereby revealed in the study of its organisation and culture, which identifies the working classes as a 'risk group', marginalising them in a manner reminiscent of the early nineteenth century.
  
  This book is a powerful petition for the exclusion of private enterprise from the public sector and an argument against neoliberalism as a modernising economic order.