Every day, performance management systems silently do what we rarely acknowledge: they criminalize the worker. Behind polished dashboards and calibration meetings lies a hidden violence, where nuanced human effort is flattened into reductive metrics and categories. Those labelled “underperforming” are often cast into a shadow economy of stigma and exclusion—echoing the scars inflicted by the criminal justice system’s punitive machinery. Both systems construct binary narratives of reward or punishment, erasing context and complexity.

In the sterile confines of corporate offices and the grim halls of courthouses, two parallel systems of control quietly shape our lives. One judges the “criminal,” the other the “employee”—both reduced to constructed narratives, their complex realities distilled into the binary outcomes of punishment or reward. While criminal justice and performance management may seem worlds apart, they share a troubling kinship, rooted in the myth of individual freedom and the enforcement mechanisms that preserve exploitative power hierarchies.

At the heart of each system lies the Kantian assumption of the autonomous, rational subject: the criminal is held responsible for misdeeds, the worker for output. This reductionist vision is neither accidental nor incidental. As Richard Edwards argued in Contested Terrain and Harry Braverman exposed in Labour and Monopoly Capital, managerial control has always been about regulating and disciplining labour, not merely driving productivity. In criminal justice, Alan Norrie’s “penal equation”—crime plus responsibility equals punishment—finds its mirror in the performance management formula: performance plus accountability equals carrot and stick. This carceral logic of modernity breaches institutional boundaries, saturating both law and management alike.

Yet in both cases, the veneer of individual agency serves to obscure the deeper structural forces—economic, social, and organisational—that shape outcomes. The criminal justice system ignores the socio-economic conditions that influence criminal behaviour, while performance management overlooks workplace inequalities and systemic barriers to success. Both claim to be arbiters of fairness, yet outcomes systematically favour those with structural advantages. In the UK, around 70–80% of the prison population comes from lower socio-economic backgrounds, including those with limited educational attainment, unstable employment histories, and high levels of social deprivation. Research examining racialised policing and gendered workplace evaluations reveals how these systems not only individualise structural inequality but also reproduce and entrench hierarchies of domination. Negative “marks” in both spheres—a “needs improvement” rating, a Performance Improvement Plan, or a criminal record—act as sticky stigmas that trap individuals in cycles of disadvantage. Managers and judges alike interpret behaviour through the prism of past “failure,” restricting access to vital development and deepening “scarring effects” on confidence, motivation, and mental health. These effects weigh most heavily on marginalised groups, compounding inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender, and further reproducing and legitimating existing social hierarchies.

Central to both systems is the internalisation of control. Workers and offenders become self-regulating subjects, aligning their actions with corporate KPIs or prevailing social norms. Althusser’s concept of “ideological state apparatuses” highlights how institutions interpellate individuals—whether as offenders or employees—into roles defined by accountability and self-blame. Underperformance is pathologised as a deficit in skills or mindset, erasing socio-economic determinants. Quantifiable outputs become proxies for personal worth, legitimising existing hierarchies and marginalising the underclass. The performance review and criminal trial both operate as “technologies of the self”, compelling individuals to internalise surveillance and self-regulation. In both realms, the myth of meritocracy institutionalises freedom as a tool of social control, transforming systemic failures into so-called “bad choices” and fostering institutional amnesia.

The parallels become even clearer when we examine the language used in both domains. Terms such as “rehabilitation”, “development plans”, and “coaching” cloak surveillance and enforced conformity in the rhetoric of empowerment. The myth of meritocracy is systematically embedded to provide legitimacy, reframing systemic failures as individual shortcomings and lending a false sense of fairness to fundamentally unequal structures. The increasing use of predictive algorithms—in both policing and AI-driven performance reviews—adds further layers of opacity and disempowerment, serving to decontextualise and depersonalise disadvantage, and amplifying the obstacles faced by those already marginalised.

And things are not improving. Over the past century, both systems have shifted from rehabilitative ideals towards punitive cultures of control, and from welfare capitalism to dystopian surveillance. This transformation echoes Foucault’s concept of “biopower”: the governance of populations through the micromanagement of bodies and behaviours. People analytics, social scoring, and statistical risk assessments now discipline populations through abstraction and surveillance.

Of course, these regimes are not all-encompassing. The histories of both prison and workplace resistance testify to the persistence of collective agency even under coercion. Workers and offenders actively contest and redefine the meaning of accountability, at times achieving pockets of fairness and genuine development—though these remain rare exceptions that ultimately highlight the rigidity of the broader system.

For leaders seriously committed to justice, the imperative is radical dismantling—not marginal adjustments. The superficial remedies of “continuous feedback” or “manager empathy” merely reinforce disciplinary structures. Instead, organizations must confront the carceral logics shaping performance management:

This project demands both courage and clarity from business and HR leadership. We must recognise that there can be no retributive justice within a distributionally unjust order. This means resisting easy fixes and working instead towards liberatory structures that transform accountability from an individualised technology of control into a social foundation for collective flourishing and justice.

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