‘Governmentality’ and Governing Corrections: Do Senior Managers Resist?

Abstract

Several criminologists have observed that the art of regulating and controlling penal practices from above has been transformed. There are new structures of power, and new rationalities, alliances and values, which change how punishment works, how it is experienced and how it is organized. New practices and programmes are introduced continually, all of which incorporate the discourse of success and failure. They specify the achievement of very specific goals (O’Malley, 1996: 196), some of which seem impossible for criminal justice agencies to realize. Their aspired accomplishment forms part of the political character of late-modern penality. New devices intended to give effect to this form of rule include performance measurement and testing, market testing and privatization, and service-level agreements. Such techniques represent a contractual form of management which Shearing and Sampson refer to as ‘nodal’ and ‘contractual governance’, respectively.

The POA [Prison Officers’ Association in England and Wales], encouraged by concern about jobs, are being more flexible. … I have just spent two days at Dartmoor and Liverpool. I saw things at both prisons I never thought I’d see: 240 people in education; the evening meal at 6 p.m. I want more of this.

(Commissioner of Correctional Services, November 2003)

The governments of the 1980s and 1990s have… tended to combine responsibilisation moves with measures intended to consolidate central power, directing the actions of others, more or less coercively, to bring them into line with centrally-defined goals.

(Garland, 1996: 464)

We have to demonstrate that we can make sure the things we do can work.… We need to make a transformation in the way we do business.

(Martin Narey, then Chief Executive of NOMS, to probation staff, 2004)

Number Ten are quite excited about the Carter reforms. This is right at the cutting edge of public sector reform.

(Martin Narey, then Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service, to colleagues, 2004)