Dangerousness and modern society

Abstract

In most modern societies, dangerousness has come to have a specific penological meaning. It is usually taken to refer to that group of offenders whose propensity to repeatedly commit crimes of a non-capital but otherwise serious nature puts the wellbeing of the rest of the community at risk. How such offenders should then be punished has been a vexatious issue since the very conceptualisation of dangerousness across such societies around the end of the nineteenth century. The strategies that came to be adopted to punish and control those who were so judged went by a variety of names1 but usually involved some form of indeterminate prison sentence. These powers have been periodically reviewed and reformulated but essentially they have remained on the statute books in most of these societies, sometimes drawing on mental health powers of compulsory detention as well.2 This is because another problematic aspect of dangerousness is the way in which those offenders judged to possess this quality also tend to be regarded as ‘neither sane nor insane’ (Kozol et al. 1972). Again, this combination of repeated criminality in conjunction with a problematic but legally unclassifiable mental state has provoked the introduction of special measures of control. Much of the subsequent discussions on dangerousness have then centred around the ethical dilemmas associated with their use: to what extent is it legitimate to punish an offender for the kind of person they are judged to be, in addition to the crimes they have committed; and to what extent is it permissible in Western societies to detain an offender on the assumption that they might commit a crime in the future?

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