Book review: Henrique Carvalho, The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law
| Author | Peter Ramsay |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618789212 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618789212
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(4) 603 –613
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480618789212
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Book reviews
Henrique Carvalho, The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2017;
224 pp.: 9780198737858, £60.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Peter Ramsay, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Henrique Carvalho’s book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on
the deployment of the substantive criminal law in an anticipatory mode. In this ‘preven-
tive turn’, legislation has created offences that criminalize conduct in a way that permits
the pre-emption of criminal wrongdoing long before the moment for the commission of
a complete criminal wrong arises. This securitization of the criminal law has represented
a challenge for the dominant school of moral philosophical theorizing about criminal
law. The prevention of crime by these legal means raises questions about the proper
scope of the state’s power to criminalize conduct, and these are questions that belong to
political theory. In attempting to understand the preventive turn, Carvalho locates the
problem that it creates as one lying at the core of liberal political theory.
Carvalho investigates the preventive turn in criminal law from the point of view of the
changing conception of the responsible legal subject. The anticipatory offences of prepa-
ration, possession and breach of a preventive order do not criminalize and punish persons
for the reasons advanced under the traditional liberal model of criminal law—the culpa-
ble causing of harm. Rather they criminalize conduct remote from any actual harm, and
punish those who commit the criminalized conduct for being risky subjects, for being
dangerous. At the heart of the book is an exploration of the idea of the dangerous subject
of criminal law and of its relation with the responsible subject.
Understanding the idea of the responsible subject of criminal law has been a key
aspect of the flowering of criminal law theory since the 1960s (Lacey, 2001).
State punishment can be rendered justifiable, it is thought, if the law is respectful of this
subject imposing punishment only where it finds responsibility. The strength of
Carvalho’s account is to identify what he calls an ‘ambivalence’ at the heart of this
responsible subject, and to locate the source of that ambivalence at the core of the
classical liberal political theory. The ambivalence arises from the problem of too much
liberty. The individual freedom that is at the normative core of liberalism must allow that
the free individual is free to do the wrong thing, that this same individual is the source of
789212TCR0010.1177/1362480618789212Theoretical CriminologyBook reviews
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