Bureaucracy, Private Prisons and the Future of Penal Reform

Abstract

This paper uses the private prisons debate to explore the legitimacy and accountability of prison generally. Attempts to determine the superiority (or inferiority) of private prisons cannot be resovled because of the normative and operational ambiguity of prison as a form of punishment. Instead this debate obscures the spread of a particular bureaucratic rationality in contemporary punishment that facilitates the expansion of prisons.