Preventitive Detention Essay

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Michael Lewis Short Essay #4 Preventive detention is an imprisonment that is not imposed as the punishment for a crime, but in order to prevent a person from committing a crime, if that person is deemed likely to commit a crime. But preventive has some presuppositions of the moral capacity of the offender. Preventive detention, first assumes that offenders are responsible for their actions. The offender can control their conduct in accordance with the criminal law. And secondly, preventive detention assumes that the offender is capable of moral self-governance. Simply put, the offender lives and knows what is right and what is wrong. Yet the problems with these assumptions are, what if the offender is not responsible for his or her action or what if they aren’t capable of moral self-governance? For example, what if the offender was deemed insane while he or she committed the act in question? Since the law states that the offender is legally not responsible for the action then that offender absolutely cannot be held responsible by any means. It is instances such as these that make the justification of preventive detention by means of a retributive defense problematic. Antony Duff seems to be up for the challenge and he constructs an argument for continued punitive confinement on what he believes to be a small population of offenders who are tireless in that they show a pattern of violent offending even when they have had previous and recurring convictions and punishments, they prove time and time again that they cannot be deterred. Though he admits the fact that individuals have the right to be presumed harmless, even after the recurring convictions and punishments for thereof, he argues that that right is revocable and can be taken away. A violent criminal past of a sufficiently reluctant and recurring type might be sufficient in order to do so. According to
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