Stories of Change 137
appealing in areas of health and welfare, but conservative crimecontrol
strategy was explicitly aimed at extending and strengthening
the reach of the law.
It is this political thrust which explains the 'co-option' of the
back-to-justice model. There is little doubt that the original liberal
version of this model originated in the ideology of minimum
statism. The neo-liberal attack on rehabilitation, the therapeutic
state and doing good, emerged from a particular reading of the
troubled politics of the America of the Sixties. The lesson was not
that the social order needed fortification, but that the state and its
agents could not be trusted to do g~, that discretionary authority
was inevitably arbitrary and government, repressive. The
solution was the justice model: not benevolence (which had
'failed ') but at least fairness, decency and protection from the arbitrary
authority of the state.
But, as liberal critics of neo-liberalism now ruefully note, the
just-deserts model merely re-entered into the political arena of
the state - an arena now dominated by conservative law-and-order
politics. The irony was obvious: those who mistrusted the state to
administer rehabilitation in a just and humane manner, were now
placing total faith in the state to punish justly and humanely.36
I will return in chapter 7 to the troublesome questions of justice
and humanity, but this analysis is clearly correct in showing that
whatever else was achieved by the justice model (the move for
example to fixed sentencing), this has not cut down the power of
the state. Quite the reverse: 'a system is created where the whims
of the administrators are exchanged for 'an enormously powerful,
simple and centralized system of state control. '37 Neo-classicism
needs a strong centralized state more than does positivism.
To these ideological twists must be added the question of professional
interests. The very same state workers who run the control
business - professionals, experts, bureaucrats, managers - were
now supposed to be rallying around the libertarian, non-interventionist
and 'hands-off' flags. The likelihood, as we will see in
chapter 5, that such groups would support policies which resulted
in anything other than more work, prestige and power for people
just like themselves, was not very high.
Whether or not this was 'ironical', it was certainly odd that the
adherents of reforms to curtail state power also believed that these
reforms would be implemented with the assistance of the state:
'In other words, the targets of change (criminal justice agencies)
were expected to use monetary rewards to reduce their nets. Since
this reform strategy functioned to increase the resources available