Preventive Justice

This book arises from a three-year study of Preventive Justice directed by Professor Andrew Ashworth and Professor Lucia Zedner at the University of Oxford. The study seeks to develop an account of the principles and values that should guide and limit the state's use of preventive techniques that involve coercion against the individual. States today are increasingly using criminal law or criminal law-like tools to try to prevent or reduce the risk of anticipated future harm. Such measures include criminalizing conduct at an early stage in order to allow authorities to intervene; incapacitating suspected future wrongdoers; and imposing extended sentences or indefinate on past wrongdoers on the basis of their predicted future conduct - all in the name of public protection and security. The chief justification for the state's use of coercion is protecting the public from harm. Although the rationales and justifications of state punishment have been explored extensively, the scope, limits and principles of preventive justice have attracted little doctrinal or conceptual analysis. This book re-assesses the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection, focussing particularly on coercive measures involving deprivation of liberty. It examines whether these measures are justified, whether they distort the proper boundaries between criminal and civil law, or whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security. In so doing, it sets out to establish a framework for what we call 'Preventive Justice'.

1 - Introduction: the State and Coercive Preventive Measures
2 - The Historical Origins of the Preventive State
3 - Prevention, Policing and Criminal Procedure
4 - Civil Preventive Orders
5 - Preventive Offences in the Criminal Law: Rationales and Limits
6 - Risk Assessment and the Preventive Role of the Criminal Court
7 - Preventive Detention of the Dangerous
8 - Counter-Terrorism Laws and Security Measures
9 - Public Health Law, Prevention and Liberty
10 - Prevention and Immigration Laws
11 - Conclusions: the Preventive State and its Proper Limits

Andrew Ashworth is Vinerian Professor of English Law Emeritus in the University of Oxford, a member of the Centre for Criminology and a Fellow of All Souls College. Until 2010 he was chair of the Sentencing Advisory Panel for England and Wales. He co-directed (with Professor Lucia Zedner) a three-year study of Preventive Justice, generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is General Editor of the Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice, and is a former editor (and now active editorial board member) of the Criminal Law Review. Lucia Zedner is Professor of Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law and a member of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. With Andrew Ashworth, Professor Zedner co-directed a three-year study of Preventive Justice generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is also Conjoint Professor, Faculty of Law University of New South Wales, Sydney. Lucia Zedner is former General Editor and a member of the Editorial Board of the Clarendon Studies in Criminology Series published by Oxford University Press and she serves on the editorial boards of several criminal law and criminology journals.