To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice.

AuthorFerrall, Bard R.
PositionReview

BRUCE L. BENSON, TO SERVE AND PROTECT: PRIVATIZATION AND COMMUNITY IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE (NY: New York University Press, 1998) 371pp.

With justice to crime victims as the prime consideration, and seeking to explain the fact that only a small minority of crimes are reported, solved, and punished, the author undertakes a cost/benefit analysis of the private, or nonstate organizations providing various kinds of crime control in contemporary America. An historical analysis indicates that while the response to crime was once primarily community-based, state involvement in crime control has grown significantly in the past two centuries. Presently, however, there is a growing trend back towards nonstate organizations. Included in this trend are several types of organizations, including citizen and neighborhood crime watches, private security forces, bail bondsmen and privately run prisons and halfway houses. Although state agency involvement with and encouragement of some of these groups is growing, (e.g., police participation with citizen anti-crime groups,) and understanding the trend towards privatization requires examination the institutional setting of the interaction of private and state agencies. "Contracting out" of security and correctional services is the most prominent type of public-private interaction. Whether contracting private security and correctional firms will achieve the purposes of criminal justice depends highly on the approach of the state demanding the contracted services: where contracts awards are based on patronage or bribery, abuse and inefficiency often results; where bidding is truly competitive, the likelihood is for both improved quality and reduced cost. Although privatization has advanced to the point that in some aspects, crime control is provided primarily by private agencies, there is still much resistance to the trend. Political opposition comes from many criminal justice bureaucracies. Much opposition...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT