The Symbolic Functions of Penal Managerialism: Revisiting the 'New Penology'

• In Event: Dangerous Subjects, Actuarial Knowledges, and Revisiting the ‘New Penology’: Critical Carceral Studies

Abstract

Criminologists have increasingly sought to identify the rise of managerialism in criminal justice systems around the Western world over the last three decades or so. Whether critical of managerialism or not, such scholarship has typically treated the idioms and operations of managerialism as morally neutral and dispassionate, as if they are irrelevant or even stand in contrast to what are described and explained as the inherently expressive dimensions of criminal justice. The aim of this paper is to argue instead that managerialism performs key symbolic functions in the field of criminal justice in that it consolidates and broadens the appeal of punitive policies and practices by coating them with a gloss of objectivity and procedural fairness. Particular attention is paid in this regard to the selective use of statistical indicators and expert judgments about crime, the superficial evaluation of the internal procedures of the criminal justice system, and the proliferation of actuarial tools that assess the dangerousness of individuals in a reductionist manner.

Author

• Leonidas Cheliotis, University of Edinburgh