5 - The Progress of Marketisation: The Prison and Probation Experience

Summary

Introduction

We have noted in the Introduction to this volume that there is a distinction between privatisation – the sale of public assets to the private sector or foreign governments – and marketisation – the purchase by the state of public services in markets or pseudo markets (that is, markets which are created and maintained by government regulation). In particular, marketisation often refers to the purchase of those services which the state formerly provided directly. In practice, this often amounts to a form of public outsourcing or sub-contracting by public sector commissioners.

It is often claimed that the process of marketisation in general, and in criminal justice specifically, results from politicians’ adoption of a (socalled) ‘neo-liberal’ ideology. However, we should be wary in making such a claim; it is not even clear such an ideology exists. The term neo-liberalism itself is much contested; it is used widely in a pejorative sense – people seldom use it to describe their own outlook. What is clear is that the remit of the state has changed in recent decades from direct ownership and operation of public assets to an increasing reliance on the utilisation of market mechanisms and market-based mechanisms to provide public goods and services. Such a move, we contend, may be theorised as reflecting policy makers’ responses to prevailing incentive structures rather than the adoption of a coherent ideological stance. We examine such incentives in the next section. We then go on to outline the process of marketisation in the prisons and probation service. Next we consider whether the application of marketisation has facilitated the realisation of stated and assumed policy goals. Discussions and conclusions follow.

Drivers of marketisation

In their recent summary of outcomes-based commissioning, Albertson et al (2018) identify five political drivers of marketisation in general, and in criminal justice commissioning in particular. To these we might add two drivers from the point of view of the private sector. It should be noted that these drivers operate on a sub-theoretical level; they are realised as individual political-economic actors maximise their returns through the prevailing incentive structure and current global liberal market economy.