When Vocation Meets Quantification: The Empowerment of Experts in the German Prison Sector

Experts such as criminologists play a significant but underestimated role in the practices of ‘office-holding’ (Du Gay, 2017) in the German prison service. The hallmark of the German prison sector is its diversity which frequently leads to debates about the fairness among the different sixteen Länder. Differences are, for example, evident in practices of open prisons and systems of parole (Rowe & Turner, 2016). The standard explanation for the sector’s diversity is Germany’s federal system. However, differences in prison systems among Länder but also among single prisons were significant before the wider federalism reforms of 2006, suggesting the need for different explanations. One such explanation is that individual initiatives induced by experts, mostly criminologists, and practitioners in prison administrations bring in diversity.

Recently, an increasing number of quantification practices have proliferated in the prison sector through trends such as New Public Management (Mennicken, 2013). Drawing on a case study of the German prison sector, this paper focuses on the very current introduction of systems for evaluation and benchmarking of treatment programs (Suhling & Guéridon, 2016). Such systems allegedly pave the way for improving the quality of public services (Hood, 2007) and prevent deviant practices (Osrecki, 2015). This paper explores the ambiguities experts face through quantification instruments. On the one hand, quantification paves the way for a neoliberal managerialisation of a sector which in Germany has been a stronghold of values of office. On the other hand, quantification empowers a small community of experts to put upfront what they consider to be both their vocation and the main task of ‘the office’ of prison services. What is at stake are the values at the heart of the offices in the penal sector: resocialization competes with neoliberal economization and neoconservative securitization – and experts are at the center of this struggle.