As more areas of government experience budget problems, the search for efficient and cost effective services has intensified. Private sector involvement is under heavy consideration. Twenty-eight original essays reflect expert opinions in three areas: police, adjudication, and corrections. Included are two reprinted articles, by Warren Burger, former Chief Justice of the United States and Richard Nealy, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court. Perspectives range from desirability to implementation. Part one analyzes public and private provision of the various police functions with an evaluation of private police services. Part two focuses on the supply of private judiciary services in civil cases. Part three looks at privatizing correctional services, from supplies to complete private management.

With more than one million people behind bars, the United States imprisons a larger share of its population than any other industrialized nation. This has precipitated a serious overcrowding problem with federal and state prisons currently operating well beyond capacity. Conventional efforts appear unable to cope with the increasing shortage of beds or with inadequate rehabilitation services. A bold solution is required; increasingly it is being seen to reside in the private sector. This timely volume explores the issues of private versus public financing, construction, and management of medium-and high-security prisons.Private prisons are not a new concept in the United States. They have existed in several forms since the eighteenth century. The opening chapters evaluate historical cases of prisons for profit, examining the concerns of labor, abuses of inmates, and the source and resolution of disputes between private and public sectors. These chapters argue that the experience gained through privatization does not justify current opposition from civil libertarians or labor unions.Chapters dealing with the modern contracting out of complete management and limited services document the growing trend toward privatization and instances of public/private partnership in prison industries.The assembled evidence indicates clearly that privately run prisons have shown significant cost savings and good quality of provision for prisoners while still being profitable. However, the authors caution that these promising results must be reinforced by public safeguards in the contracting stage and monitoring to assure good service and security. With the American prison system in disarray, the public interest demands that government look beyond the public or private identity of those who wish to provide correctional services and focus instead on who can provide the best services at a given cost. It is essential to state that correctional services should attain several objectives and not merely cost minimization. The analysis and recommendations presented here will aid in the task. Privatizing Correctional Institutions will be of interest to law-enforcement officials, public policy analysts, penologists, and criminologists.

"The era of mass incarceration has been associated with the idea of "law and order," referring to the carceral regime in which politicians exploited public anxieties over crime and funneled resources into policing and prisons. As important as this system was and remains, there has been a shift in recent years shaped by neoliberalism-the political, economic, and sociocultural program that has supplanted liberal democratic legal frameworks, subordinating them to operations of the market and mandating that private entities intervene in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement of law. While courts and legislatures play a significant role in shaping legal personhood in the United States, private, profit-driven institutions are increasingly responsible for determining the post-sentence consequences that people with criminal convictions face. The result has been a move from the courtroom to the boardroom, from a law-and-order society to a policy-and-order society. From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project that examines the role of the criminal justice system in implementing neoliberal restructuring in the United States, including the partial transfer of quasi-judicial authority to employers, landlords, lenders, social media companies, and other businesses. Deena Varner examines the way the consumer background report industry has privatized the surveillance and punishment of individuals, conflating crime with bad credit and eviction history. She looks at how Airbnb's 2018 policy of banning people convicted of crimes is an example of the way corporate entities are increasingly vested with the authority to determine things like the seriousness or severity of crimes. Varner also examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture," arguing that this is best understood not as an example of the culture wars but rather of the way judicial power has been transferred from the state to the individual judgments of citizens-a partial return to what Foucault described as the punitive model of infamy"--

After an up-to-date overview of the development of private sector involvement in penal practice worldwide, the authors go on to describe in depth the first 18 months in the life of Wolds Remand Prison, the first private prison in Britain.

This collection offers a comprehensive review of the origins, scale and breadth of the privatisation and marketisation revolution across the criminal justice system. Leading academics and researchers assess the consequences of market-driven criminal justice in a wide range of contexts, from prison and probation to policing, migrant detention, rehabilitation and community programmes. Using economic, sociological and criminological perspectives, illuminated by accessible case studies, they consider the shifting roles and interactions of the public, private and voluntary sectors. As privatisation, outsourcing and the impact of market cultures spread further across the system, the authors look ahead to future developments and signpost the way to reform in a ‘post-market’ criminal justice sphere.

Assesses the state of the debate on the privatization of justice. Key aspects of the arguments are examined and compared, as the authors clarify both the theoretical issues and the practical problems involved in the privatization of justice.