While inmates in German prisons are deprived of financial control to a large extent, they are gradually granted access to money to facilitate their resocialisation. This study explores how state authorities in the German prison system employ individual budgets to regulate prisoners’ control over their personal finance and thereby deconstruct and reconstruct individual citizenship. Following Foucault’s ideas on disciplinary power and governmentality (1977, 2009, 2008) and the subsequent works of Miller & O’Leary (1987) and Rose (1999) we research how organizations and states rely on accounting instruments such as budgets, to discipline and govern individuals as economically active citizens (back) into a population of market actors.
Empirically, we draw on an international comparative research project, which investigates the role of quantification in new forms of governing and managing public organizations. Our data analysis in the German prison sector by now builds on 28 in-depth, qualitative and semi-structured interviews with high-level bureaucrats in ministries of justice, experts such as criminologists and administrators such as directors, controllers and heads of department of six different prison facilities. We also draw on document analysis.
Our findings reveal a sophisticated system of different money streams and budgets, consisting of “prison money” (Hausgeld), “transition money” (Übergangsgeld) and “private money” (Eigengeld). These funds are categorized as “free” or “unfree” money, depending on whether and on what conditions individual prisoners can decide upon its use. “Prison money”, for example, can only be used to buy goods in special prison shops. “Transition money” is a budget gradually build up and reserved for the first months after release. Inmates earn these different budgets through the obligatory work during their sentence. Inmates unable to work are granted “pocket money” (Taschengeld) for a minimum of extra needs. This mixture of predetermined and self-controlled budgets and accounts serve as educational measures to restrict financial control on the one hand, while training financial duties and responsibilities in protected market exchanges.
To public management, this paper contributes an in-depth study of how budgets can be used to deconstruct and reconstruct individual citizenship. It shows how budgets for imprisoned citizens can serve as educational technology to serve social policy rationales, such as resocialization. “Free” and “unfree” budgets allow practicing responsible behaviour in a protected setting. Such budgets discipline and educate prisoners to become active market actors (again). Seen from a governmentality perspective, the participation in legal market exchanges is becoming an ever more central part of being a citizen and opens regulators new possibilities for governing through freedom (Rose, 1999) – even in prisons.
References
Foucault, M., 2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978. Picador.
Foucault, M., 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Foucault, M., 1977. Discipline and Punish. Penguin.
Miller, P., O’Leary, T., 1987. Accounting and the construction of the governable person. Accounting, Organizations and Society 12, 235–265.
Rose, N., 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge University Press.
IRSPM_full_paper-IlogaBalep-Junne-panel-n31_final.pdf 