ABSTRACT
Ten years ago John Pratt and I finished work on an edited collection titled Dangerous Offenders: Punishment and Social Order. The focus of that collection was historical and contemporary formulations of dangerousness and the kinds of responses engendered by the spectre of dangerousness. Though much attention was given, particularly in essays by Pat O’Malley and John Pratt himself, to continuity and change in understandings of dangerousness, what stands out most to me now is the representation of dangerousness as something apart and something distant. One important device for achieving this was the depiction of the dangerous as monsters: for O’Malley ‘an image of evil that could not possibly be “us” and that is beyond the rational’ (2000: 28); for Pratt it was ‘embodied in the figure of today’s “sexual predator”, as if such monsters may surreptitiously move into our neighbourhoods, and against such eventuality the entire community must be mobilised’ (2000: 46). At the same time, Pratt’s analysis of dangerousness laws in western countries had suggested that while such laws might be growing in number, the most remarkable feature was that their apotheosis, the preventive detention scheme in its various forms, remained in fact little used (Pratt 1995). It was as if imagining and conjuring up the dangerous offender served an important political and symbolic purpose, but dangerousness was just that, much more a spectre than a reality of social life and practical penality. Dangerousness was thus, in a sense, a field of possibility that could, but never quite did, draw upon the resources for public protection that measures like the indefinite sentence provided.
