Book review: Wendy Fitzgibbon and John Lea, Privatising Justice: The Security Industry, War and Crime Control
| Author | Jose M Lopez-Riba |
| DOI | 10.1177/20662203211034011 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Wendy Fitzgibbon and John Lea, Privatising Justice: The Security Industry, War and Crime Control.
London: Pluto Press, 2020; 211 pp.: ISBN 978-0-7453-9925-6, €83,08 (hbk).
Reviewed by: Jose M Lopez-Riba, University of Girona, Spain
Privatising Justice is a comprehensive analysis of the private sector’s role in the ap-
plication of coercive power in Britain, specifically in the fields of war (the military),
policing (the police and the security industry), and punishment (prisons and probation
services). As Fitzgibbon and Lea, and others like Zedner (2006) have stated the State’s
monopoly in those aspects, which are now central to our understanding of the State, is
rather the exception in history. Knowing how we got here allows us to contextualize some
current criminological debates of great relevance regarding privatization (e.g. the case of
the probation service in England). In addition, this book also offers some notes about what
we might expect in the future that distinguish it from some simplistic analyses of the
privatization of the State or about corporate republics.
The book starts in 18th-century Britain with what the authors call ‘old privatization’,
which is the topic of Chapter 1. British capitalism expanded with the collaboration of the
private sector and the State. Externally, the process of British colonization was led by the
private sector: the recruitment of private military and the quasi-State power of companies
such as the East India Company. Internally, the coercive power to impose the new
economic order was mainly in the hands of local and private actors. Contrary to what
happened with the involvement of the private sector in colonization, which was suc-
cessful, some aspects of the private ruling of internal security and prisons were in fact
obstacles to the expansion of capitalism. In the field of probation, the private sector,
mainly in the form of charities, was the innovator in order to establish a system of
rehabilitation for offenders as an alternative to prison (only for those who deserve it).
Independently of its efficiency, the private sector was removed from those areas in the
name of State legitimacy. That is the topic of Chapter 2 ‘The Consolidation of State
Power’. Here, the authors explain the reasons why the private sector reduced its par-
ticipation in those forms of coercive power during the first decades of the 19th century and
until the middle of the 20th century. The decline of private military forces was related to
the resignificance of war as a form of ‘nation building’, a trend consolidated with the two
World Wars. The decline of private security was the result of the disappearance of gated
communities (which were an obstacle to the free movement of persons and goods) and the
rise of the police as the symbol of social cohesion and order. In the case of the prisons, the
State model prevails upon the old local and private model because of its legitimacy to
impose the new rehabilitation-oriented form of punishment. Regarding probation, al-
though the service was never totally absorbed by the State, a conflict between the old
religious-based form of doing the job, represented by the London Police Court Missions,
and a newer scientifically based form promoted by the Home Office, meant the disap-
pearance of the former. The expansion of the State peaked during the Second World War
and the period that followed, when internal social cohesion was at its best and there was a
204 European Journal of Probation 13(2)
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