When is an offender not an offender? Power, the client and shifting penal subjectivities ERIN DONOHUE AND DAWN MOORE University of Ottawa, Canada and Carleton University, Canada Abstract Despite the torrent of the punitive state, people in conflict with the law are made up as ‘clients’ of criminal justice. This article looks curiously upon the figure of the client, positioning her as a translation of the offender who flags particular relationships of justice. While the client is nowhere to be found on the public face of punishment, she emerges in the most unlikely of places (prisons, courts) when looking at punishment’s inner workings. The client, we argue, is born of the elision of managerial and consumerist discourses in order to recruit people in conflict with the law and justice workers into contemporary penal project. The subject positions of criminal justice actors (offenders and workers) are reframed such that they are all active agents in the practice of social service delivery. These translations reveal the fluidity of identities and relation- ships within the criminal justice system and teach us about the political strategies underlying differing argots of punishment. Key Words agency • consumerism • managerialism • punitive turn • rehabilitation INTRODUCTION This article is about recasting people in conflict with the law as clients of criminal justice institutions. Clients are not an entirely new species in the territory of criminal justice but they are not well explored, especially in their current iteration. Specifically, we are interested in how and why offenders are translated into clients through particu- lar relationships. The client and the offender are characters of the criminal justice system (CJS) with divergent subjectivities. Offenders are wanton and hopeless, better ware- housed on account of their dangerousness. They are the objects of punishment harken- ing back to classic retributive notions currently enjoying reinvigorated popularity in the 319 PUNISHMENT & SOCIETY Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav 1462-4745; Vol 11(3): 319–336 DOI: 10.1177/1462474509334174 at UNIV OF OTTAWA LIBRARY on August 26, 2015 pun.sagepub.com Downloaded from