Contesting market rationality: Discursive struggles over prison privatization
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517751665 |
| Author | Brett Burkhardt |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
Contesting market
2019, Vol. 21(2) 162–186
! The Author(s) 2018
rationality: Discursive
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517751665
struggles over prison
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
privatization
Brett Burkhardt
Oregon State University, USA
Abstract
Market rationality suffuses many areas of modern criminal justice. Prison privatization
is one area in which market rationality is particularly salient. This paper presents a
case study of how market rationality was deployed in public discourse on prison
privatization. It answers four questions: (1) Who shaped public discourse on prison
privatization? (2) How frequently were market-rational themes invoked in the public
discourse?, (3) Who employed (and who avoided) market-rational themes in the
discourse?, and (4) Why did rates of market-rational discourse change over time? To
answer these questions, the paper analyzes public discourse in four major American
newspapers from 1985 to 2008. It employs a series of descriptive statistics and regres-
sion analyses, as well as an underutilized method—formal decomposition analysis.
The research contributes to historical knowledge of the development of prison
privatization, methodological techniques for analyzing textual data, and theoretical
understanding of how public actors engage in discursive struggles over the meaning
of criminal justice policies.
Keywords
content analysis, criminal justice, framing, market rationality, private prisons
Corresponding author:
Brett Burkhardt, School of Public Policy, Oregon State University, 300 Bexell Hall, Corvallis, USA.
Email: brett.burkhardt@oregonstate.edu
Burkhardt
163
Markets pervade modern criminal justice. Business owners hire private security
teams to protect their property (Stoughton, 2017). Venture capitalists invest in
social impact bonds, which promise to pay out upon meeting recidivism targets
(Myers and Goddard, 2016). Commercial bonding companies provide pretrial bail
for persons accused of a crime, in exchange for a fee (Maruna et al., 2012).
Technology companies sell their wares to police departments (Wamsley, 2017).
Private companies offer offender-funded community supervision for probationers,
often serving as de facto debt collectors (Stillman, 2014). Prisons contract with
private vendors for food, medicine, and technology (In the Public Interest, 2015).
Together, these examples illustrate a robust market rationality, which prioritizes
efficiency, cost minimization, and returns on investment.
This paper presents a case study of how market rationality was employed in
public discourse surrounding prison privatization. Prison privatization serves as a
good site for examining market rationality because it by definition creates a market
in which firms offer their carceral services to governments in exchange for com-
pensation. It is thus natural to regard prison privatization in market terms
(Garland, 2001: 189). Yet, while prison privatization involves market exchange,
it simultaneously remains punishment. As such, the practice remains susceptible to
alternative conceptions and orientations, including those more focused on moral-
ity, justice, or human rights. How people discuss prison privatization tells us
something about its role in American society (Garland, 1990).
The paper conceives of public discourse as one important means by which
public actors may influence criminal justice policy, generally, and prison privati-
zation, specifically. It answers four questions: (1) Who shaped public discourse on
prison privatization?, (2) How frequently was market rationality invoked in the
public discourse?, (3) Who discussed (and who avoided) market rationality in the
discourse?, and (4) Why did market-rational language change over time? The paper
analyzes public discourse on prison privatization published in four major
American newspapers (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,
and Houston Chronicle) from 1985 to 2008. The research contributes to recent
theoretical statements that emphasize the role of conflict and struggle in shaping
criminal justice policy (Goodman et al., 2014, 2017). Furthermore, in focusing on
actors in the penal field, the paper advances our historical understanding of prison
privatization and demonstrates how an underutilized method—formal decompo-
sition analysis—can aid in future analyses of discursive dynamics.
Literature
Market rationality and symbolic struggles
Market rationality is ubiquitous in modern American society. By market rational-
ity I mean the use of market-based indicators (e.g. costs, stock prices), relations
(e.g. contracts, competitions), and logics (e.g. commodification) to facilitate
provision of goods and services.1 Market rationality has entered into a variety
164
Punishment & Society 21(2)
of domains not historically thought of as economic: family, education, democracy,
and identity, among others (Brown, 2015; Centeno and Cohen, 2012; Fourcade and
Healy, 2017). Market rationality guided much public administration from the 1980s
through the 2000s. In particular, the influential New Public Management school
of public administration emphasized efficiency, competition, and arm’s-length rela-
tions in governance (Hood, 1991; Pollitt, 2003). A series of market-oriented reforms
were distilled in 1992’s Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Is Transforming the Public Sector (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). This book served
as a blueprint for Vice President Al Gore’s 1993 National Performance Review,
which sought and implemented efficiency-enhancing reforms throughout the federal
government (Kamensky, 1996; Kettl, 2002).
During this era, market rationality seeped into criminal justice discourses and
practices. In The Culture of Control, David Garland describes a process by which
crime control efforts, once driven by efforts to improve society, were overtaken
by an economistic desire to manage risks and minimize costs. Garland (2001:
188–189) writes:
For much of the twentieth century, most crime policy and criminal justice decisions
were underpinned by a social style of reasoning. Crime problems had a social cause
and a social solution. . .Recently, however, a different way of approaching problems
has emerged, a style that might be described as ‘economic’ rather than social. . ..
Managerialism. . .has flowed into the vacuum created when the more substantive,
more positive content of the old social approach lost credibility. The crime control
field—from crime prevention work and policing to the prison regimes and the practice
of parole—has become saturated with technologies of audit, fiscal control, measured
performance, and cost-benefit evaluation. The old language of social causation has
been displaced by a new lexicon (of ‘risk factors’, ‘incentive structures’, ‘supply and
demand’, ‘stocks and flows’, ‘crime costing’, and ‘penalty pricing’) that translates
economic forms of calculation into the criminological field.
The decline of the “social” rationale in criminal justice—Garland’s (2001) penal
welfarism—opened space for new ways of thinking about and justifying criminal
justice practices. Into the vacuum rushed new rationales for punishment, including
retribution (Cullen et al., 2000; Enns, 2014), risk management (Feeley and Simon,
1992; Garland, 2001), and market rationality. The latter adopted market-inspired
metrics (e.g. cost savings) and practices (e.g. using contracts to specify obligations)
to guide the administration of justice, with little regard for broader social out-
comes. In this sense, market rationality in criminal justice policy can be seen as one
manifestation of the “new penology,” which prioritizes efficient control of large
populations of offenders. As stated by Feeley and Simon (1992: 455), the new
penology “is concerned with the rationality not of individual behavior or even
community organization, but of managerial processes.” Rather than aiming for
broad social goals (e.g. successful reintegration of offenders), penal managers
adopt quantifiable measures based on system outputs (which may incorporate
Burkhardt
165
returns on investment). Successful operation is then signaled by a unit’s capacity to
achieve these internally set goals in a way that maximizes efficiency (Feeley and
Simon, 1992; Garland, 1996; Lacey, 1994; Liebling and Crewe, 2013; Raine and
Willson, 1997).
While market rationality has clearly entered the realm of criminal justice, it
should not be viewed as a hegemonic and impersonal force of nature. In fact,
market rationality—as with any ideological orientation—relies on human carriers
to adopt and transmit the message (Cheliotis, 2006; Lynch, 1998; Peck, 2010: 4;
Rengifo et al., 2017; Wacquant, 2009: xx). Recent research argues that criminal
justice policy is constantly contested by actors who seek to shape meanings, goals,
and processes. In their “agonistic” theory of criminal justice, Goodman et al.
(2014, 2017) issue a call to view criminal justice policy as the result of constant
struggle among sets of actors wielding varying forms and amounts of resources.
These struggles may involve conventional political behavior, disobedience, and
protest. Importantly, they may also involve symbolic struggles over what criminal
justice policies and practices mean. Once researchers give attention to these strug-
gles, it becomes apparent that taken-for-granted “solutions” to crime problems are
never fated to occur; they emerge from struggle. Those policies and perspectives
that do achieve some degree of...
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