“Free” and “unfree” money in German prisons: The role of accounting in educating public service users

• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Author: Nathalie Iloga Balep,Jaromir Junne
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12228
• Date: 01 May 2020

Received: 31 January 2019 Revised: 14 October 2019 Accepted: 19 December 2019

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12228

RESEARCH ARTICLE

“Free” and “unfree” money in German prisons: The

role of accounting in educating public service users

Nathalie Iloga Balep Jaromir Junne

Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences,

Department of Management Accounting and

Control, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg,

Germany

Correspondence

NathalieIloga Balep, Faculty of Economic and

SocialSciences, Department of Management

Accountingand Control, Helmut Schmidt Uni-

versity,Holstenhofweg 85, 22043 Hamburg,

Germany.

Email:nathalie.ilogabalep@hsu-hh.de

[Correctionadded on 25 January, 2020: In

theabstract “marked actors” was changed to

“marketactors”]

Abstract

This paper explores how public organizations use accounting as a

pedagogical instrument for educating individual citizens. Drawing

on conceptions of financial literacy and governmentality, our paper

presents the findings of a qualitative case study of German prisons

and analyzes how accounting practices shape interactions between

public organizations and individual citizens. Our findings show

how three types of financial accounts—prison money,gate money,

and private money—grant prisoners differentiated access to funds.

Prison administrators refer to these accounts as “free” or “unfree,”

depending on whether prisoners can decide how the money will

be used. The study reveals how German law, ministries, and prison

administrations attach three basic virtues to prisoner accounts—

legal consumption,financial prudence,andsocial responsibility—in

an attempt to include individuals (back) into a population of eco-

nomically and socially functioning citizens. To public management

research, this paper contributes a description of how public institu-

tions employ accounting as a pedagogical technology in interactions

with individual citizens. To prior works on financial literacy, we

add the idea that educative measures not only produce viable and

disciplined market actors, but also transport specific virtues of

being a social citizen. Finally, our study discusses how disciplinary

and postdisciplinary notions of accounting interact and provide

possibilities for governing through freedom—evenbehind bars.

KEYWORDS

accounting, financial literacy, governmentality, new public manage-

ment, service user

This is an open access article under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distri-

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c

2020 The Authors. Financial Accountability & Management published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd

Financial Acc & Man. 2020;36:171–188. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/faam 171

172 ILOGABALEP AND JUNNE

1INTRODUCTION

Accounting practices have become a common tool in public organizations for mobilizing specific ideas, concepts, and

political agendas in order to guide management and steering. Prior public management and accounting research has

shown how accounting instruments enact the New Public Management (NPM) agenda in organizations (Dunleavy &

Hood, 1994; Hood, 1991, 1995; Steccolini, 2019). For the sake of more efficient and responsible management, an

avalanche of numbers comprising various indicators and performance measures have been introduced to quantify

and control the success of administrative processes, individual administrators, and organizations (Brunsson & Sahlin-

Andersson, 2000; Hood, 2004; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004).

Extant literature has also discussed how neoliberal ideas and programs address individual citizens as users, cus-

tomers, and co-producers of public services (Köppe, Ewert, & Blank, 2016). The increased interest in the economic

agency of citizens has highlighted the relevance of accounting as a means of governing individuals (Miller & O’Leary,

1994; Miller & Rose, 2006; Rose, 1999). More recently,the educational effects of accounting on individuals have been

discussed in the context of financial literacy as the link among economic participation, accounting skills, and societal

inclusion of citizens (Bay,2018; Bay, Catasús, & Johed, 2014). The relatively small number of works on the educational

role of accounting has mainly focused on how accounting is used to educate individuals about economic rationality and

basic calculative capacities. So far,no research has been directed toward the ways in which financial literacy is linked

to citizens’ legal and social conduct in efforts to foster their integration into society.

Prisons provide a good example of public organizations, which use accounting in their interactions with “service

users.” Prisoners are often described as service users (National Offender Management Service [NOMS], 2011) and

somewhat “involuntary clients” (Ferguson, 2007, p. 396) with limited rights to participate in the economy.Scholarly

engagements with accounting in prisons have strongly focused on the theme of prison privatization (Cooper & Tay-

lor, 2005; Mitchelson, 2014; Nathan, 2003; Taylor & Cooper, 2008), mainly in Great Britain. Crowhurst and Harwich

(2016), Mennicken (2013, 2014) as well as Avio(1998) enlarged the topic of prison privatization by reflecting on how

quantification is used to calculate both economic and noneconomic performance. Although the citizenship status of

prisoners is implicitly addressed in extant literature, for example,in discussions about decency and other elements of

moral performance (Liebling & Arnold, 2005) or in an analysis of how juveniledelinquents are governed by “rehearsing

citizenship” (Triantafillou& Moreira, 2002), the role of accounting in constructing the prisoner as an economic actor

has not been fully explored.

Our study aims to explore the role of accounting as an educativemeasure of public organizations. Drawing on con-

cepts of financial literacyand governmentality, it explores how German prisons use accounting to educate their service

users as economic citizens in an attempt to foster their resocialization.1A system of personalized financial accounts

for each prisoner is used not only to transmit basic economic viability,but also to invoke essential citizen virtues and

duties. Prisons are particularly interesting in this regard because as closed-off systems, they represent nearly perfect

“laboratory conditions” where a set of accounting practicesis imposed on a very heterogeneous group of service users

regardingcrime, age, social status, family background, education, and others aiming at creating financial equality within

the prison and at educating its users toward responsible economic citizenship. In dealing with their inmates, prisons

face wickedproblems (Ferlie, Fitzgerald, McGivern, Dopson, & Bennett, 2011; Jacobs & Cuganesan, 2014) as they have

to simultaneously enact interdependent, competing value sets, such as security and resocialization, rehearsing lawful

behavior with criminals, and enforcing restrictions while promoting a responsible approach to freedom—in short, how

to govern through freedom, evenbehind bars. Prisons provide a particularly interesting case for our study as exclusion

from and inclusion into society is continuously renegotiated with prisoners who appear, as a specific group of public

service users, particularly precarious in terms of lawful, economic, and social behavior.

First, our findings direct attention to the pedagogical impetus of the state, which uses accounting instruments to

address marginalized service users as economic citizens. Through accounting, the state aims to gradually educate and

prepareprisoners for re-entry into a populationof free market actors. This attempt highlights the importance accorded

to economical skills and virtues for being a good and functioning citizen. Prisoners are marginalized because they are