Consumer society, commodification and offender management
| Author | Fergus McNeill,Trish McCulloch |
| Published date | 01 August 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895807078863 |
| Date | 01 August 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 7(3): 223–242
DOI: 10.1177/1748895807078863
223
Consumer society, commodification and
offender management
TRISH McCULLOCH AND FERGUS McNEILL
University of Dundee and Universities of Glasgow and
Strathclyde, UK
Abstract
This article aims to set current developments in ‘offender
management’ services in England and Wales and in Scotland within
the contexts first of a discussion of Bauman’s analysis of crime and
punishment in consumer society and second of wider debates about
the commodification of public services. Rather than examining the
formal commodification of offender management through
organizational restructuring, ‘contestability’ and marketization, the
authors examine the extent to which the substantive commodification
of offender management is already evidenced in the way that
probation’s products, consumers and processes of production have
been reconfigured within the public sector. In the concluding
discussion, they consider both some limitations on the extent of
commodification to date and the prospects for the containment or
moderation of the process in the future.
Key Words
commodification • consumer society • offender management
• penality • probation
Introduction
In a rapidly changing policy climate, the commodification of probation or
‘offender management’ has been understood and interpreted differently by
different actors in the penal system. For politicians and policy makers (even
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those who at one stage expressed concern at the privatization and com-
mercialization of state services), commodification seems to have become
almost synonymous with innovation and reform—a necessary feature of
recent governments’ relentless commitment to the modernization and ‘con-
tinuous improvement’ of public sector bureaucracies. For private industry,
the commodification of probation presents an evolving opportunity to
share in and, perhaps more significantly, shape a market previously demar-
cated as ‘off limits’. For many within the probation service, commodifica-
tion presents yet another challenge which, at best, will likely result in the
further emulation of the mechanisms of the market in service delivery and,
at worst, will see the emergence of a thoroughgoing mixed economy which
‘intentionally and systematically destroys the near-monopoly of the public
sector, in order to institutionalize a permanently competitive—and in the
Government’s terms more desirable—environment’ (Nellis, 2006: 55). For
these reasons, the future forms and functions of the probation service in
England and Wales are currently the subject of much needed speculation
and debate (for several important recent contributions to this debate see
Hough et al., 2006).
Necessarily, much of this discussion has been concerned with the immi-
nent threat of what we might term the formal commodification of pro-
bation through contestability, marketization and further organizational
re-structuring. However, this is not the main focus of this article. Here, we
aim to set these developments within the broader context of the emergence
of consumer society, illustrating the extent to which consumer society has
already affected the substantive commodification of probation both as a
penal product and as a penal process, largely within the state sector. To this
end, the article begins with a brief discussion of Zygmunt Bauman’s analy-
sis of crime and punishment in consumer society. We then examine three
key aspects of the commodification of probation and offender management
services in the UK, exploring how probation’s products, consumers and
processes of production have been reconfigured. In exploring each of these
themes attention will be given to key problems intrinsic to the commodifi-
cation of probation and, in closing, to potential opportunities for the con-
tainment or moderation of that process.
Commodification, crime and punishment
For Bauman, consumer society is inherently individualistic and insecure; in-
deed, it compels its citizens to sacrifice collective security in the pursuit of
individual liberty. Individualism is itself the source of insecurity not just
because, in the absence of collective provision, it compels us to look after
ourselves, but because of the inherently competitive nature of consumption
which ‘sets individuals at cross purposes, often at each other’s throats’
(Bauman, 1997: 39). Whereas societies focused on production found mech-
anisms to discipline and regulate citizens through their productive roles,
224 Criminology & Criminal Justice 7(3)
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