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Criminal Law

2013

Crime prevention

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich Mar 2013

Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich

Michael L Rich

Traditional methods of crime prevention—the punishment of the culpable and the preventive restraint of the dangerous—are slowly being supplemented and supplanted by technologies that seek to perfectly prevent crime by making criminal conduct practically impossible. For instance, the federal government is developing in-car technology that would prevent vehicle operation when a driver has a blood alcohol level in excess of the legal limit. Less directly, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 try to prevent copyright infringement by eliminating technologies that enable such infringement. Such structural regulation of private conduct is not new, but few scholars …


Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique, Bernard E. Harcourt Jan 2013

Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter identifies the origins of contemporary preventive endeavour in the work of the RAND Corporation in America, which developed highly technical studies of crime prevention based upon systems analysis. It suggests that RAND promoted a decidedly punitive style of prevention based upon policing and punishment that is replicated in modern ‘punitive preventive measures’. It criticizes these measures, emphasizing the perils they pose and the weakness of their empirical foundations. Most worryingly, these measures typically claim an apolitical, neutral emphasis on efficiency that fails to engage with the political values underlying them. In so doing, it tends to displace much …