ABSTRACT
One of the great paradoxes of the ‘dangerous offender’ notion is that such a variety of offences qualify individuals for this label. So too do there exist an almost equally great variety of penal responses to the risks and threats such offenders are felt to present. Ironically, then, both the figure of the dangerous offender and the attending ensemble of penal concepts and practices such individuals seem to require have taken on something of a routine appearance in contemporary penality. Risk assessment, cognitive-behavioural therapy, special sentencing strategies, special release mechanisms and so on: each of these represents what might be termed ‘growth technologies’ in the penal sphere. Perhaps the fastest growing of them all, and one which seems to have captured something of the anxiety and apprehension surrounding dangerousness itself, is the idea of risk. This potentially innocuous concept – one that at another time might never have escaped the discourses of interested professionals – has functioned something like a conduit, however, linking and bringing together a range of otherwise separate lines of thought and practice both within criminal justice and across a wide range of social and scientific disciplines. In relation to the dangerous offender, the concept of risk has become something of a touchstone, an orienting principle around which decisions about appropriate responses to perceived danger are conceived and organised. Yet rather than providing a co-ordinating principle for dealings with the dangerous offender, risk seems instead to have served as a general justifying proposition for the development of different and often conflicting legal and administrative rationalities within the justice system. Risks presented by an offender frequently are calculated in different and often contradictory ways and these differing conceptions of risk are used to justify a set of equally disparate and conflicting responses to the supposedly dangerous individual. It is on the grounds of these different conceptions of risk, therefore, that penal strategies as diverse as three-strikes laws, intensive therapeutic programmes and indefinite sentences find their justification.
