Privatising Punishment in Europe?

In recent times the question of private sector involvement in public affairs has become framed in altogether new terms. Across Europe, there has been a growth in various forms of public-private cooperation in building and maintaining (new) penal institutions and an increasing presence of private companies offering security services within penal institutions as well as delivering security goods such as electronic monitoring and other equipment to penal authorities. Such developments are part of a wider trend towards privatising and marketising security. Bringing together key scholars in criminology and penology from across Europe and beyond, this book maps and describes trends of privatising punishment throughout Europe, paying attention both to prisons and community sanctions. In doing so, it initiates a continent-wide dialogue among academics and key public and private actors on the future of privatisation in Europe. Debates on the privatisation of punishment in Europe are still underdeveloped and this book plays a pioneering and agenda-setting role in developing this dialogue.

1.Privatising punishment in Europe? An agenda for research and policy (Tom Daemsand Tom Vander Beken) 2.Privatizing criminal justice: An historical analysis of entrepreneurship and innovation (Malcolm M. Feeley) 3.Privatization of punishment in Poland (Krzysztof Krajewski) 4.Privatization of punishment in Belgium (Danique Guddersand Tom Daems) 5. Privatising probation in England and Wales: Manufacturing a crisis to create a market? (Lol Burke) 6. French probation and prisoner resettlement: Involuntary ‘privatisation’ and corporatism (Martine Herzog-Evans) 7. Electronically monitoring offenders as ‘coercive connectivity’: Commerce and penality in surveillance capitalism (Mike Nellis) 8.Uneven business: Privatization of immigration detention in Europe (Michael Flynn, Matthew B. Flynnand Eryn Wagnon) 9.What is lost when punishment is privatized? (Lucia Zedner)

Tom Daems is Associate Professor at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven, Belgium. Tom Vander Beken is Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy, Ghent University, Belgium.