Privatization of Crime Control

Privatization of Crime Control

Introduction

Since the 1980s, the United Kingdom government has actively promoted the role of private security institutions within the criminal justice sector. Young offender facilities, private prisons, and training centers for children between the ages of twelve and seventeen have now been accepted as common phenomena within the criminal justice system arena (Worrall, A. 2019). Moreover, business organizations are also venturing into immigration detention centers to top up their interest in crime control while maximizing their base in incarceration. There has also been the growth of electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders such as persons subject to immigration controls, terrorists, juvenile offenders, adult offenders, and bailees. EM thus represents the growing market of the privatization of the criminal justice system.

The commercialized criminal justice system is abundant in Wales and England based on the initial developments in the United States, which have inspired a worldwide growth of commercial crime control. Globalization brought with it a reconstruction period among several western governments which entailed the state assigning its peripheral functions to statutory, voluntary and commercial sectors. The industry growth across the United Kingdom has ensured that the private security sector industry is now at the value of nine billion five hundred million pounds as of 2018 (Statistica, 2019)

This paper notes that increasingly, criminal justice is shifting towards commerce and profit, where policy is being determined by the private, business, and political interest. It would be socially irresponsible and politically naïve to continue overlooking the significance of commerce in the criminal justice system occurs (Lea, J., 2016). This paper also attempts to examine how powerful corporations are profiting from the continuous development in the privatization of crime control. Consequently, the historically powerless, the poor, including members of some racial minorities (populations particularly targeted for control schemes and the criminal justice), may fall victim to the negative consequences of privatization.

Electronic Monitoring and Private Prisons

Electronic Monitoring Contracts

Outside the United States, England and Wales are the major utilisers of electronically monitored (EM) curfews. Between 2011 and 2012, one hundred and five thousand new tags were issued, with a twenty-five thousand caseload with a total cost of one hundred and seventeen million pounds, accounting for three percent of the entire (NOMS) National Offender Management Service budget. Being that the specificities of the expenditures are confidential, it is therefore alleged that most of the cost went into installation and removal of the equipment (Park, I. 2000). In 2014, after the expiry of the contracts, Capita took over the responsibility of delivering Ems on an interim basis.

Contracts for Prison Management

Prison management contracts are divided into two that are maintained and manage and (DCMF) design, construction, manage, and finance deals. DCMF arrangements allocate contracts to both the construction and prison operations to set of contractors grouped for a particular purpose. DCMF contracts have a lifespan of twenty-five years. On the other hand, maintain and manage is a type of contract where a public prison is hired out to a private company that agrees to maintain the prison infrastructure and buildings. These are usually fifteen-year contracts (Pozen, D. 2003).

Public prisons are smaller in size compared to the private prison. The average state prison capacity across England and Wales is seven hundred and six compared to one thousand and forty-five inmates in privately managed prisons. Due to the growing prison population, there is a high probability that a large prison is privately managed prisons. Five out of the ten largest prisons in Wales and England are privately managed.

It is challenging to assess the financial world of the market of private prisons as such contracts are usually confidential. It is impossible to compare data regarding cost per place. The Home Office only conducted the last cost-effective in 1998-99 and found out that cost per place was thirteen per cent lower where privately owned prisons offered an average saving of thirteen per cent. Although, this saving was attained through higher overcrowding rates rather than accommodation cost reduction.

Market Composition

A few large companies control the market in the privatization of crime control. EM is issued on one national block. As of 2014, Capita still held the EM contract while a permanent contract is being carved. Out of one hundred and thirty prisons in England, fourteen are managed privately. Three major suppliers – Sodexo, Serco, and G4S all of the ten private prisons.

Performance and Impact of Electronic monitoring

It is difficult to examine the performance of the current EM providers because there is no public sector service that can be used to compare with. However, a 2006 review by the (NAO) National Audit Office found problems with the delivery. It was identified that only eighty-five percent of the cases were forwarded within the timeframe of the contract – midnight of the beginning of the curfew day. More seriously, only thirty-one percent of the time was a breach of a curfew issued as part of sentenced forwarded to the court within the five working days time frame (MoJ, 2012).

Overall, NAO found that the present-day contracts offer value for money with a forty percent saving about their predecessors, including a major saving when custody cost is put under consideration – five thousand three hundred pounds over a ninety-day sentence. However, EM was found incapable of reducing the chances of reoffending.

Prison Management

The prison service has been undergoing competitive pressure due to outsourcing. This has forced corporates to consider measures to reduce the cost to secure contracts of prison management. There have been negotiations between the Prison Service and the Prison Officers Association that would enable the Prison Service to acquire more malleable staffing arrangements that have enabled them to secure bids (Teague, M. 2012). For instance, when the Prison Service reclaimed the HMP Blakenhurst management contract, the incumbent private sector bid was ten percent more than the winning public sector bid. The private sector was also placed higher in terms of quality.

Privatization supporters claim that prison places cost reduction has been attained through changes that allow staffing level reductions, through the use of electronic keys, CCTV, changes such utilization of female officers reducing the culture of violence in prisons. In 2010, the prison officer to inmate rate was one to three-point seven-eight in privately managed prisons compared to one to three-point zero three in the public sector. However, some critics argue that staff reduction equally reduces the chance for individualized, personalized attention.

Critics are also concerned that competitions may have driven down the service quality provided for inmates. This is backed by a NAO finding in 2003 that discovered that competitive bids had to be priced low, and this made it challenging to meet contractual and performance obligations (NAO, 2003). There is also the concern that private prisons have high probabilities of overcrowding compared to publicly managed prisons and that in the past two decades, they have had more percentages of overcrowded accommodations compared to public prisons.

Probation Services

Probation entails the supervision released prison offenders and those under community sentences. This service is almost entirely services by the public sector. As of 2014, thirty-five probation trust answerable to NOMS delivers probation across Wales and England. These trusts jointly employ over sixteen thousand staff, where sixty percent of them work on offender management, twenty-one percent more work in delivering rehabilitation programs. In 2012, there were over two hundred and twenty thousand case offenders to be handled by the team of trusts (MoJ, 2013).

Supporters of Transforming Rehabilitation claimed that private sector volunteers were better placed at reducing reoffending, whereby the “payment by result” payment strategy will guarantee freedom of operation and develop good practice. Outsourcing is intended to provide efficiencies in saving, which guarantees that supervision is extended to released offenders serving twelve months or less prison sentence.

Probation Delivery

Probation is services by twenty-one privately managed community rehabilitation companies (CRCs). CRCs are tasked at managing a higher proportion of offenders on suspended or community sentence orders or ones who need supervision due to custodial sentences. They are expected to administer offenders, fulfill the elements of the court’s sentences, including designing and implementing new rehabilitation strategies. National Probation Service (NPS), in conjunction with CRCs, manage, support, and advice offenders estimated to provide the highest risk of harm.

Accountability and Incentives

CRC contracts allow providers with full flexibility in managing the provision of supervision and rehabilitation. To encourage excellent performance, ‘payment by the result” (PbR) is used as a funding model for accountability. “Fee for service” (FFS) is allocated to providers depending on the number of managed clients. PbR bonus is issued to the provider who can reduce the rates of reoffending, whereas providers with deteriorating reoffending rates have a portion of their fees taken away.

There has been a lot of backlash on the PbR model. Regarding the measurement of performance, it has been noted by critics that primary examination is based on a “binary measure of reoffending.” This refers to whether the offender has or has not reoffended despite the degree of the offense and the number of offenses. Thus according to critics, this is oversimplified, as it overlooks the complexities associated with “individual high-risk cases” or the reduction of the total of all offenses undertaken by their cohort offenders.

Overemphasis on the binary measure, which measures every offender who offends at least once as a failure, breaks provider incentives. This means that attention is placed more on offenders who are the least likely to reoffend. Thus working with persons who are likely to reoffend already seems difficult because it is highly impossible to stop them from reoffending. Moreover, working with persons who have already reoffending taken as a waste of time because they are already considered failures.

Contracts and Supply Chain

CRCs’ contract arrangements bear similarities to the ones utilized in the Work Programme. CRCs are administered by tier-one suppliers who directly contract with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). They directly take the risk of clawbacks due to PbR and are expected to have a deep foundation of capital to meet service delivery and bear any clawback requirements.

Beneath tier one, are tier two and tier three who establish a supply chain through sub-contractors for services needed by the rehabilitation programme contract (tier two) or grant funding award arrangements (tier three). This supply chain also includes other players who may not have the capital base as the major actor.

Concerns about Crime Control Profiteering

There have been concerns over the involvement of the corporate sector in the business of crime control. Society accepts that crime is an issue, and some resources have to be allocated towards it to control it. Despite the provision of necessary services and equipment, prisons and policing by both the private sector and the state, the private sector practitioners claim that they can do what is needed in crime control effectively, efficiently and more economically than states (McCullough and Maguigan 1994)

However, as much as crime is a problem, and that their needs to be resource allocated to deal with it in order for the population to feel secure, it presents more questions as to whether the provision of more prisons and police and increased use of security apparatus is the appropriate response (Miller 1996). This raises concerns about the commercialization practice that is increasing within the crime control sector. Specifically, the private sector is primarily motivated by making profits; however, regarding its work in the crime control, does it put into consideration social justice or public safety through humanitarian concerns or supply the needed resources beyond the available demand or need?

The nature of the private sector to go after profit may be driven to create demand in the absence of any desired need. This stretches beyond just the field of the prison system but to include other sectors of control and criminal justice in which the private sector has a hold. Privatization is said to be a significant element of what scientists refer to as the risk society. Within the sphere of criminal justice, privatization, and risk management go hand in hand.

Risk society is constituted by three logic… First, there is a negative logic. Threats and dangers, and fears about them, are dealt with by the construction of “suitable enemies” (Christie 1986) and attendant negative labeling, denial, avoidance, and exclusion. Solidarity is based on a communality of fear. Second, there is a logic of controlling the irrational by rational means. Fear becomes a basis for rational action. People turn to experts to rationalize fears and make probability choices. Third, there is a logic of insurance. The concept of risk is a neologism of insurance. In modernity, the institution of insurance is central to the rationalization of risk. (Erickson,1994)

Conclusion and Recommendation

This report has assessed the privatization of the criminal justice system within the context of Wales and England. The British government plans to privatize seventy percent of all probation work and seeks to implement the largest programme for prison privatization. The criminal justice privatization market in the UK is highly concentrated where only three companies are managing all private prisons with a single company controlling the EM.

There have been concerns regarding offender management outsourcing, with the state being accused of lacking the ability to manage large-scale contracts, which is essential when it comes to public safety. Ensuring that taxpayers receive value for their money, it is fundamental that providers be made to meet their contractual obligations. It has also been noted that price competition in the contracting process, reduce the quality of service in prisons as discovered by NAO. Thus, overcrowding and lower service standards are a common phenomenon of private prisons in an attempt at a cost-saving.

The electronic monitoring system should be cost-effective with provisions to allow room for more technological improvements, reoffending reduction, and maintain the safety of the public. An independent body that looks at the structure of prisons should be put in place to look into the issues of overcrowding and the closure of prisons. Moreover, contracts should include provisions to return prisons to public management when it comes to cases of mismanagement. There should be a system of consultation with relevant stakeholders before handing out contracts to any private company.

References

‘‘Many Organisations Set to Bid for Rehabilitation Work’, Ministry of Justice press release, 28 November 2013 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/many-organisations-set-tobid-for-rehabilitation-work

“Next steps for prison competition,” Ministry of Justice press release, 9 November 2012: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/next-steps-for-prison-competition

Ericson, R.V., 1994. The division of expert knowledge in policing and security. British Journal of Sociology, pp.149-175.

Lea, J., 2016. War, criminal justice, and the rebirth of privatization. In The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War (pp. 25-44). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

McCullough, H.L., and MaGuigan, T.S., 1994. Proving Privatization Works. Privatizing Correctional Institutions, pp.157-61.

Miller, J.G., 1996. Search and destroy: African-American males in the criminal justice system. Cambridge University Press.

Ministry of Justice (2013) Offender Management Statistics Quarterly Bulletin, October to December 2012, England and Wales (London: Ministry of Justice)

Ministry of Justice (2013) Transforming Rehabilitation Contract Package Areas (London: Ministry of Justice)

NAO (2003) The Operational Performance of PFI Prisons (London, National Audit Office)

National Audit Office, 2006, The Electronic Monitoring of Adult Offenders (London: National Audit Office)

Park, Isabelle, (2000) Review of Comparative Costs and Performance of Privately and Publicly Operated Prisons 1998-99 (London: The Home Office): http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http:/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/ pdfs/hosb600.pdf

Pozen, D, (2003), “Managing a Correctional Marketplace: Prisons Privatisation in the Unit ed States and the United Kingdom,” Journal of Law and Politics, Vol. XIX. No. 253. pp.253– 282, p.278.

Teague, M, (2012) ‘Privatising Criminal Justice: A Step Too Far?’ in Cardwell, V, (ed) Delivering Justice: The Role of the Public, Private and Voluntary Sectors in Prisons and Probation (London, Criminal Justice Alliance)

Worrall, A., 2019. THE OTHER PRICES OF PRIVATISED JUSTICE. Justice Alternatives.