ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on a relatively new set of measures for dealing with both sexual offenders and the much wider category of ‘potentially dangerous’ offenders, which is already firmly established throughout England and Wales, but which – despite the serious questions it raises about the rights of individuals, and despite its obvious relevance to broad theoretical debates about new modes of crime control and penality – has so far received surprisingly little attention from criminologists. Its key features are the setting up of formal ‘public protection’ or ‘risk management’ partnerships at a local level between police forces, probation services, social services and other agencies; the drawing up of protocols to allow the exchange of confidential information about people thought to pose a risk of harm to others; the creation of multi-agency ‘public protection panels’ (or similarly named bodies) to consider individual cases; the maintenance of special databases of offenders; routine classification of offenders into specific risk groups; and the development, implementation and monitoring of individual ‘risk management plans’. The latter may include home visits, police surveillance or, on occasion, the controlled disclosure of information about offenders to potential victims or to interested parties such as local head teachers (as yet, despite media pressure, demands for full community notification have been resisted). In the case of sexual offenders, application may also be made to the courts for a ‘Sex Offender Order’ to place legal restrictions on an individual’s movements (though this avenue, again, has been used only rarely to date).
