Penal 'austerity': The doctrine of less eligibility reborn?

This chapter presents certain arguments and historical analogies which may assist in talcing a few preliminary sightings of some distinctive features of the British penal landscape. One of the more dispiriting features of the contemporary punitive turn is its apparent ignorance of its own historical antecedents. In 1939 Hermann Mannheim recorded and anatomized in The Dilemma of Penal Reform the hold which less eligibility exerted over all early carceral enterprises. Penality becomes one element among others in a modernizing political settlement. In the case outlined by David Garland of the reforming Liberal governments in Britain in the first years of the twentieth century the tenor of the period is set by the extension of the franchise, the institutionalization of labour disputes and the move towards universalism in welfare provision. The attraction of the privatization case depends on a distinction between the allocation of punishment by the state and the delivery of penal services by its delegated agents.