privatization of security

The nature of industrialized state societies inherently requires the simultaneous existence of some sort of organized policing force, which serves to maintain order in the community.   The preservation of peace involves the assurance of security, from which the citizens derive a sense of protection from outside forces that may threaten the established order.   Thus, the emergence of state societies engendered the birth of the concept of policing (Michalowski, 170).   In attempting to legitimize its sovereignty, newly developed states emerging during the period of rapid decay of nonstate societies competed with private forces for the control of policing.   The state apparatus eventually won the battle, earning the position as the “ultimate guarantor of order within the territorial boundaries defined by the network of states” (Shearing, 402).   In order to demonstrate its authority, states established a public police force, and strictly regulated and limited the means by which private entities could engage in the patrolling of the community.  
Despite the traditional practice of monopolistic control over the maintenance of peace by the institutional state, the United States, along with many other liberal democratic societies, experienced a radical change in the structure of the security apparatus.   During the 1960s, these societies saw the beginning of an exponential increase in the employment of private security guards.   In order to understand the implications of the rapid growth in the private security sector, it is essential to observe and analyze the historical trends and developments of policing, which have led to the conditions of the current distribution of private and public personnel in the security sector of the workforce.   Three particular stages in the privatization of policing include policing as piece-work, policing in the industrial age, and policing under corporate capitalism (Spitzer, 18).
The era of policing as piece-work emerged with the end of...