Probation, People and Profits: The Impact of Neoliberalism
| Author | Michael Teague |
A former probation chief, writing in 2013, targeted the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government’s ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ (Conservative Party, 2008) with withering scorn. It was, he wrote, nothing more than a ‘rehashed search for the holy grail of credible community sentences based on even more punishment delivered within an incomprehensible and fragmented framework of privatised provision in order to deliver rehabilitation’ (Collett, 2013:175). Collett was making a fundamental point about the erosion of probation’s original reintegrative ethos by rampant neoliberal policies, and the formation of a systematically marketised environment. There can now be little doubt that a momentous cultural shift is being engendered as probation is propelled swiftly down the road of privatisation. The pace of change is fast. While this is a partial privatisation (those assessed as posing the highest risk remain subject to public sector supervision), the eventual endgame of neoliberal political philosophy may be total privatisation. When ideology and neoliberal logic dictate that probation can be reduced to a commodity that can be bought and sold, why then should the government halt at an arbitrary point where probation is only 70 per cent privatised? Regardless of the rehabilitative rhetoric, the reality may be that the privatisation of probation is about the deprioritisation of rehabilitation and penal-welfare intervention.
Neoliberalism is not just a political and economic philosophy (Harvey, 2007), but also an entrenched ideological framework, embedded and institutionalised within our justice and penal systems (Reiner, 2007). The ideological nostrums which buttress this framework have inevitably been reproduced in the transformation in probation over the last three decades. Bell (2011) provides a meticulous account of the political economy of neoliberalism and the dynamics of neoliberal governance and the justice system. Neoliberal governments assiduously support privatisation (Mercille & Murphy, 2015), not least because it promotes the power of business interests in the economy. Privatisation demands that those sectors previously operated by the state are unchained from state regulation and pass to the private sector’s operational control (Whitehead & Crawshaw, 2012). Under neoliberalism, everything is viewed as a commodity. The growing recourse to privatisation can be theorised using the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which includes the ‘commodification of assets outside the market’ (Mercille & Murphy, 2015:90).
Probation may have survived for over a century outside the market, sustained by exceptionally dedicated and creative practitioners. However, neoliberal ideology dictates that markets provide the definitive guidance for decision-making in every sphere of human endeavour, including the optimum allocation of resources. Perennial claims are advanced by advocates of neoliberalism for increasing efficiency, enhancing quality and effectiveness, cutting bureaucratic red tape, and saving public money; all of these arguments have been relentlessly rehearsed to reinforce the imperative to ‘reform’ probation. As Harvey (2007:165) argued, ‘Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract.’ This is precisely what has occurred within probation, just as it has in other public institutions (including prisons)...
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