Preventive Detention Versus Civil Commitment: Alternative Policies for Public Protection in New Zealand and California

There has been a resurgence in the use of indefinite civil commitment of dangerous sexual offenders in the United States since the early 1990s. This current generation of civil commitment laws differs from previous statutory schemes in the underlying approach to dangerousness and the conditions under which they can be applied. As implemented in California, the law results in the post-sentence detention of approximately 1% of the registered sexual offenders released from prison since the law came into effect in 1996, representing those seen as most at risk for sexual recidivism. New Zealand has taken a different approach to the indefinite detention of dangerous sexual offenders through the use of preventive detention sentencing. In recent years the relevant New Zealand statutes have broadened their criteria to allow application to a wider range of offenders. While both approaches appear to identify a similar group of high risk offenders, preventive detention appears less legally ambiguous, more clinically practical, and a better allocation of resources.