Slobogin on Preventive Justice

Christopher Slobogin (Vanderbilt University - Law School) has posted an abstract of Preventive Justice (The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Law David DeMatteo (ed.), Kyle C. Scherr (ed.), February 2023) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

Preventive justice is an approach to criminal conduct aimed primarily at individual prevention rather than deterrence of the general population or ensuring that offenders receive their just desert. Preventive justice fits more comfortably than either deterrence- or retribution-driven regimes with a psychological approach to criminal justice that assumes that behavior is heavily influenced by biology and the environment and that antisocial tendencies can be reduced through appropriate interventions. It relies heavily on empirical assessments of recidivism risk and intervention needs and deemphasizes the goal of calibrating sanctions to the culpability of offenders. After describing preventive justice in skeletal form, this chapter explains why the present moment might be a propitious time to reconsider this approach as an alternative to our current system of criminal justice. It then explores a number of preventive justice-related topics that psychological researchers could investigate.

Chapter available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197649138.013.3