Book Review: The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Chloë Kennedy |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918760887 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(3) 389–404
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918760887
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HENRIQUE CARVALHO, The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017, pp. 207, ISBN 978-0-19-873785-8, £60.00 (hbk).
In the words of its author, The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law ‘is not a legal book’
(Preface, p. x). Rather, it aims to present a phenomenology of law that captures how legal
concepts and ideas are imagined and instantiated under particular sociopolitical condi-
tions within, broadly speaking, liberal modernity. This approach distinguishes Carval-
ho’s work from much of the current literature geared towards explaining and critiquing
‘pre-inchoate’ and ‘inchoate’ offences. While many scholars undertaking these enter-
prises fall back on the familiar, and ostensibly limiting, principles of harm, autonomy,
desert and so on, Carvalho instead shows how the liberal tradition on which these
principles are based is premised on the same logic that underpins the preventive turn
itself. In so doing, he shows that the capacity of liberal criminal law scholarship to
challenge or restrain the proliferation of prophylactic crimes is inevitably compromised.
Carvalho develops this corrective account by carefully exposing the various ways in
which security and liberty exist in a relationship of mutually necessitating tension. These
subtleties are missed when one assumes, as many criminal law theorists working in the
liberal tradition do, that these two interests are opposed and must therefore be balanced
against one another. In the first two chapters of the book, Carvalho lays out the core of
his alternative interpretation: Security, which depends on preventive action, is a condi-
tion of the lawful exercise of individual liberty and individual autonomy is required for
the maintenance of security. In other words, just ‘as liberty needs to be protected by
prevention at the same time it needs to be protected from it’ (p. 12). This interrelationship
between liberty and prevention undermines any clear-cut distinction between punish-
ment and prevention and reflects, so Carvalho argues, the two ‘essentially contradictory
notions of human nature and subjectivity’ (p. 19) that structure the criminal law –
responsibility and dangerousness – which, respectively, align with and undermine trust-
worthiness. As with security and liberty, these two paradigms are inseparably linked;
dangerousness always abides within liberal...
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