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l'Information Psychiatrique. Volume 84, Number 6, 533-41, Juin-Juillet 2008, Biopolitique

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Author(s) : Claude-Olivier Doron

Summary : Preventive detention: towards a new type of legal positivism?Analysing the general legal principles of the law on preventive detention, I will show how they can be assimilated to legal positivism which claims the right to break with legal rationality in order to place dealing with dangerousness at the heart of legal policies and proposes an unlimited and undefined form of risk management. Returning to the history of legal positivism and the emergence of the problem of dangerousness, I summarise the fundamental characteristics in order to highlight the differences which distinguish the current evolution. Whilst legal positivism was a doctrine in favour of defence of society, the current trend is the infinite protection of the single, suffering individual \; this tendency is worrying in that it does not seem to contain any limitative principle and denies the legitimacy of any criticism.

Keywords : dangerousness, punishment, sexual offence, legal positivism, victim, criminology