Preventive Detention – and Psychiatry

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. –Benjamin Franklin

It’s no suprisee that our society contains people who support the idea of preventive detention. What is surprising is that this support cuts across the usual political ideologies and allegiances. Dr. Karl Menninger, a benevolent humanist, and Attorney General Mitchell, a law-and-order hard-liner, have both recently come out in support of the idea of preventive detention as a partial solution to the crime problem—Menninger in his The Crime of Punishment (Viking, 1968) and Mitchell in proposed criminal legislation for the District of Columbia.’

Preventive detention, generally speaking, consists in locking people up for what they might do, rather than for what they have in fact done. It is generally taught that our legal system does not in theory countenance such proceedings. But, of course, it does countenance and even encourage them in fact—though generally under some euphemistic description. Obvious examples are status crimes (like vagrancy), refusal of bail for those accused— though not convicted—of crime, involuntary commitment for the “insane,” and wide judicial discretion in matters of parole and length of sentence. Such discretion might allow a judge to extend a man’s sentence (for either punishment or therapy) if he believes the man is still prone to cr...