NCJ Number
85074
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 22 Issue: 3 Dated: (July 1982) Pages: complete issue
Editor(s)
G Trasler
Date Published
1982
Length
113 pages
Annotation
Criminologists and corrections specialists, responding to the Floud report on 'Dangerousness and Criminal Justice,' debate the ethics and procedural difficulties surrounding predictions of dangerousness and preventive sentencing in Britain.
Abstract
The report is the product of a Working Party of the Howard League for Penal Reform. The papers open with a review by Jean Floud of the Working Party's principles and conclusions. Reaffirming the difficulty in accurately predicting dangerousness, the Floud report acknowledged the traces of preventive sentencing in the British system and the rationale behind it. The report determined that protective sentencing should occur under strict statutory control and be applied only to specified categories of 'grave harm.' Within these categories, judges would have discretion to determine the existence of grave harm and offender dangerousness. The report found substantive tests of dangerousness infeasible, recommending that an independent tribunal review preventive sentences regularly, with the Home Secretary making release decisions. Critics of the Floud report generally attack the logic of arguments justifying preventive sentencing on principles of redistribution of risk -- the risk to the public of probable danger vs. the risk to the offender of certain loss of freedom -- and the public's right to expect protection from what it fears may occur. Floud separates the dilemma of false positives (a person determined to be dangerous but who would not have offended again) from dispositional false positives -- in effect asserting that a decision made according to sound statutory rules is just whether or not the offender would offend again. Other criticisms address the justification of current sentences (not addressed by Floud), the use of judgments of the offender's past offense, character, and intention to justify extra detention, and the issue of costs to the system and offender. One paper from a U.S. perspective documents experiments in predicting dangerousness; several long-term studies suggest that the probability of certain types of offenders offending again is very high, in the 90 percent range. A U.S. corrections official, speaking from his experience with Maryland's Defective Delinquent Law at Patuxent notes political trends and their effect on dangerousness policies. The official suggests that the low predictability rate in dangerousness research occurs partly from scientific studies' tendency to use homogeneous populations, which appears to lower correlations. References accompany individual papers.