Changing of the Guards: Private Influences, Privatization, and Criminal Justice in Canada

A comprehensive assessment of privatization in the Canadian criminal justice field. 

Although in recent decades service outsourcing has spread throughout Canada’s prisons and jails as well as into its police, courts, and national security institutions, the expanding scope and pace of corporate involvement in criminal justice functions have not yet been closely investigated. Changing of the Guards provides a comprehensive assessment of privatization and private influence across the twenty-first-century Canadian criminal justice field. It illuminates the many consequences of public-private arrangements for law and policy, transparency, accountability, the administration of justice, equity, and public debate. Within the contexts of policing, sentencing, imprisonment, border control, and national security, the contributors explore crucial questions about legitimacy, policy diffusion, racism, inequality, corruption, and democracy itself.
 

Alex Luscombe is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto.

Derek Silva is associate professor of sociology at King’s University College at Western University and adjunct research professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University.

Kevin Walby is associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is co-author of Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution, Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada, and Changing of the Guards: Private Influences, Privatization, and Criminal Justice in Canada.