NCJ Number
120319
Date Published
1989
Length
16 pages
Annotation
The crime prevention responsibilities of the State, weighed against the civil liberties of the individual citizen, create a constant dilemma and raise questions of constitutionality.
Abstract
Even the liberal State takes preventive measures, and conversely, the totalitarian State cannot organize its preventive measures perfectly nor without repression. Expanded government preventive activity becomes repression shifted ahead of time and is ineffective in its original purpose. The anti-prevention liberal State, operating on the premise that nature and individual freedom produce justice, unintentionally becomes the guarantor of private oppression. Customarily, the protection of one person's liberty requires the restriction of another's; the constitutionality of a restriction depends on an appropriate balancing of the liberty of all parties involved and accurately measuring the danger posed and the according degree of the restriction. Prevention laws serve both protective and restrictive functions and their legitimacy must ultimately be derived from freedom itself.