Commercialising disadvantage the neoliberal discourses of commercial bail bond websites

The commercial bail bond industry is one of the most profitable as-pects America’s highly marketized criminal justice system that increasinglyshaped by neoliberal structures and ideologies. Drawing on a specialised corpusof “Home” “About Us” pages from websites, this paper firstempirical linguistic examination bonds discourse grounded inits legal context. Using corpus-assisted critical analysis, we examinehow companies 1) discursively present promote their services, 2)represent its processes, 3) construe arrest detentionto prospective service users. findings show positiontheir services as an unobjectionably common (Brookes Harvey 2017a) partof financial self-management normalising, legitimising, idealis-ing use whilst seeking to minimise power-imbalance between themselvesand often financially socially disempowered ‘clients’. By grounding ourlinguistic analysis in context, demonstrate these discourses simul-taneously serve oppress those they purport help, offering example ofa local form structural violence subtly perpetuates agendas anda two-tier system.