Risk and dangerousness: pre-crimes and preventive crimes

Robert Castel (1991) famously differentiated between dangerousness and risk, distinguishing between them in terms of dangerousness as a diagnosis based on the analysis of individual symptoms, and risk as involving assignment of a case to a statistical category. Individuals are dangerous to the extent that as unique subjects they are manifesting specified symptoms (of sickness, of deviance etc.) that transgress particular thresholds of severity. Castel understood dangerousness as a personal proclivity revealed through symptomology but in itself concealed: hence, dangerousness is always open to second opinions and each case is unique. Moreover, it might be considered as an indeterminable and unstable entity, changing in intensity depending on the various circumstances in which the subject is contextually situated. As such, dangerousness is associated with various long-established forms of preventive detention. However, these relate to the specific subject: to the specific individual known through complex diagnostic records and/or through the rich description of a case.

Risk, on the other hand, is not a property of the individual. Castel argues that ‘the new strategies dissolve the notion of a subject or concrete individual and put in its place a combinatory of factors, the factors of risk.’ (Castel, 1991, p. 281). The need to identify specific individuals however does not disappear in risk. Specific individuals remain available to medicine, psychiatry, criminal justice and so on, and remain their ‘targets’. However, they are known differently: through their belonging in risk pools. Little more need be known about them other than what is required to be known for this mode of risk identification and classification. Gone is the complex case history, the biography, the in-depth knowledge of the subject, the individualized intervention. Henceforward they are to be known through their risk profile—which may be as little as a score on a risk schedule or register.