Book Review: <i>Changing the guard: Private influences, privatization, and criminal justice in Canada</i> by Luscombe, A., Walby, K., and Silva, D. (Eds.) LuscombeA., WalbyK., and SilvaD. (Eds.) (2022).Changing the guard: Private influences, privatization, and criminal justice in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. x, 305 pp., $37.95(paperback), ISBN 9780774866842.

There remain many unanswered questions about the growing privatization of criminal justice in Canada and its social impact, yet these questions have been neglected by Canadian researchers.Changing of the Guards not only revisits these questions but also broadens them, sometimes in an unexpected way.The edited volume by Luscombe, Walby, and Silva is a very appreciated multidisciplinary contribution to an under-researched area.It fills some gaps in our knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, it proposes a fresh understanding of some of the key issues related to the increasingly central role private actors play in the public safety area and in the criminal justice system.A main theme of the book is the idea that privatization, in its many forms, is reshaping criminal justice institutions and processes in often harmful and anti-democratic ways.The other important theme is the realization that privatization contributes to the greater opacity of the criminal justice system and offers that system a new means of justifying its lack of transparency and avoiding accountability.The book is divided into four parts which reveal the extent to which institutional developments in the Canadian criminal justice system have opened the door to varying degrees of private influence and privatization.Part 1, "Private Provision and Purchase of Policing," examines the increasingly blurred lines between private and public policing and includes a chapter by Massimiliano Mulone who proposes a theoretical framework based on the theory of institutional isomorphism and suggests how the homogenization of public-private policing should be resisted.A second chapter, by Stewen Cohn, shows how the work of policing images of child exploitation is complex and involves ambiguous alliances between the state and non-state actors.It recounts how a non-governmental organization developed relationships with policing agencies and corporations and expanded its mandate to engage in activities alongside and at times in place of law enforcement agencies.A third chapter, by Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot, considers how elements of post-secondary education environments, including the dual challenges of autonomy and liability in the provision of security in that context, fortify the blurring between public and private security policing in the post-secondary environment.Part 2, "Private Actors in City Spaces and Surveillance," offers two chapters concerned with private security, surveillance, and governance in the urban context.A chapter on policing smart cities, by Jamie Duncan and Daniella Barreto, examines how the proliferation of for-profit datadriven technologies used by police can amplify the overcriminalization and underprotection of racialized and marginalized groups, while a chapter by Debra Mackinnon, using Vancouver as a case study, explores how city governments in collaboration with business improvement agencies implement a range of private, tech-based "solutions" and expand public-private governance and service delivery.

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