From the Courtroom to the Boardroom: Privatizing Justice in the Neoliberal United States

The era of mass incarceration has been associated with the idea of “law and order,” referring to the carceral regime in which politicians exploited public anxieties over crime and funneled resources into policing and prisons. As important as this system has been and remains to be, there has been a shift in recent years shaped by neoliberalism—the political, economic, and sociocultural program that has supplanted liberal democratic legal frameworks, subordinating them to operations of the market and mandating that private entities intervene in the creation, interpretation, and enforcement of law. While courts and legislatures play a significant role in shaping legal personhood in the neoliberal United States, private, profit-driven institutions are increasingly responsible for determining the post-sentence consequences that people with criminal convictions face. The result has been a move from the courtroom to the boardroom, from a law-and-order society to a policy-and-order society.From the Courtroom to the Boardroom is an interdisciplinary cultural studies project that examines the role of the criminal justice system in implementing neoliberal restructuring in the United States, including the partial transfer of quasi-judicial authority to employers, landlords, lenders, social media companies, and other businesses. In this important study, Deena Varner examines the way the consumer background report industry has privatized the surveillance and punishment of individuals, conflating crime with bad credit and eviction history. She positions Airbnb’s 2018 policy of banning people convicted of crimes as an example of the way corporate entities are increasingly vested with the authority to determine things like the seriousness or severity of crimes. Varner also tackles the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” arguing that this is best understood not as a feature of the culture wars but rather as a partial return to what Foucault described as the punitive model of infamy, in which the responsibility for punishing has been transferred from the state to individuals.