This article develops an account of the current emergence of the security state as successor to the liberal welfare state. It is argued that the security state heralds a new type of authoritarianism which, beginning at the periphery and pre-occupied with the management of the marginalized and socially excluded, is gradually infecting the core social institutions, the criminal justice system in particular. The article considers three areas in which the security state is emerging—the transition from welfare to workfare and risk management; new measures to combat terrorism and organized crime; and the blurring of warfare and crime control. The article concludes by stressing the mutually reinforcing effect of these developments.
The current debate about the privatisation of probation in the UK has tended to set up a false dichotomy between state and private that diverts attention from the fact that privatisation as part of a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ intends, in fact, to continue the domination of the risk management approach. What is emerging is a public–private combination of increasingly centralised public sector probation and the private ‘security-industrial complex’ of global security corporations. An important consequence of this process is the annihilation of both residual elements of voluntary sector and community work within probation itself and of the smaller private charities and third sector organisations that have long collaborated with probation in traditional desistance work. This complex dynamic is a reflection of some of the key internal inconsistencies of neoliberalism as a political strategy.
IntroductionCommentators have charted new pluralistic modes of governance beyond the State in the advanced liberal democracies, viewing them as produced and reproduced through cultural and political relations. 1 These include new rationalities of rule and the cultural background, processes of institution and nation building that underpin these rationalities. 2 This fluid picture of new forms of governance can appear chaotic but governance theorists have attempted to link the fragments within broader conceptions of governanceconceived as the attempts to shape human conduct-operating in mutually inter-penetrating ways at every level. These range from self/bodily governance all the way through to the operation of global institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations. 3
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