Symposium on Preventive Justice Preface

Abstract

Ideas of prevention (the prevention of harms, or of wrongs, or of crimes) have always played a significant role in accounts of the proper aims of a system of criminal law, but in recent years they have come to play a more prominent and disturbing part in developments in criminal law policies—most obviously, but by no means only, in the USA and Britain. Governments have sought to meet (or to be seen to be meeting) a range of perceived threats, such as terrorism, organised crime, and various kinds of sexual predation, by looking for more effective modes of prevention. Sometimes this involves expanding the criminal law to capture more types of preparatory conduct, or conduct (including various kinds of possession) that might facilitate the commission of target crimes; sometimes it involves expanding non-criminal provisions for preventive detention, or other kinds of restriction on the liberty of those thought to be dangerous (restrictions that may themselves be backed by criminal sanctions): both kinds of expansion are normatively problematic, and raise serious questions about the role that the criminal law should play in a contemporary democracy (for very useful ways into the central problems in this area, see Ashworth and Zedner 2014; Ashworth et al. 2013). The papers in this symposium address different dimensions of the problem of ‘preventive justice’. Two of them, those by David Cole and Hadassa Noordal, focus on the wide range of preventive restrictions and constraints to which people may be subjected (including those that do not involve actual detention, but nonetheless very seriously restrict the person’s ability to lead any kind of normal life); on the normative problems that such restrictions raise; and on how we can set appropriate constraints on their use. A third paper, by Susan Dimock, argues that a carefully crafted and limited system of preventive detention, based on the creation of a new offence of ‘being a persistent violent dangerous offender’, could be consistent with those liberal ‘rule of law’ values that are often thought to preclude preventive detention. Finally, Stuart Green’s paper explores the role played by