Persistent Offenders and Preventive Detention

Abstract

The author is presently Senior Adviser with the Asia and Far East Institute, United Nations, Fuchu, Japan. From 1956 until 1964 he was in the Home Office Research Unit, London. He has been a consultant to universities and departments of corrections in the United States and elsewhere. In 1962-63 he was on sabbatical leave from the Home Office as Ford Foundation Research Fellow and Consultant to the President's Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. An earlier article by Mr. Wilkins appeared in the September, 1965 number of this Journal under the title of New Thinking in Criminal Statistics. Mr. Wilkins here considers the experience in England in dealing with habitual offenders and the use of preventive detention: in particular, the change in legislation in 1948 is examined. It appears that preventive detention has been used for persistent nuisances as well as for dangerous offenders, or perhaps more frequently. The author ventures the opinion that the persistent nuisance is not best dealt with by prison treatment, but that some new form of protected workshop system might be worth trying. Mr. Wilkins' present article first appeared, in Japanese, in Tsumi to Batsu (Crime and Punishment), published by the Japan Society of Criminal Science (Volume 2, Number 4, June, 1965). We are grateful to the publishers of that Journal for permission to re-publish Mr. Wilkins' article in the English language.