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The Danger of “Dangerousness”




Saleem A. Shah

• National Institute of Mental Health, Rockville, Maryland



“Dangerousness: A Paradigm for Exploring Some Issues in Law and Psychology.” American Psychologist 33 (1978): 224–238.




In the United States, thousands of people each year suffer the loss of their liberty because they are judged to be “dangerous” to themselves or to others. Dangerous behavior is defined as “acts that are characterized by the application of or the overt threat of force and that are likely to result in injury.” Judgments of the dangerousness of an individual are important to the criminal justice and mental health systems in a variety of areas: decisions concerning bail, sentencing, parole, competence to stand trial, emergency and involuntary commitment, and release from mental hospitals. The author observes: “Despite the very serious consequences that can follow for individuals officially designated dangerous, it is astonishing to note the frequent absence of clear and specific definitions and criteria in laws pertaining to the commitment and release of the mentally ill and of persons handled via 'sexual psychopath’ laws and related statutes.” Recent law suits have led to more precise definitions and stricter decision rules.

The use of dangerousness as a criterion for incarceration assumes someone's ability to make accurate predictions about the future occurrence of such behavior. However, a convincing body of literature makes clear the difficulties involved in predicting events with very low base rates. The author indicates, however, that these predictions “are accompanied by rather high rates of ‘false positive’ errors; that is, the great majority of the persons predicted as likely to engage in future violent behavior will not display such behavior.” Despite the possibility of such errors, social and political pressures are often brought to bear to incarcerate potentially dangerous persons on the presumption of “better safe than sorry.” The author notes that while the mentally ill have been targets for preventive detention, other sources of demonstrated dangerousness do not provoke comparable concerns (e.g., repeating drunken drivers).

In citing the work of Dershowitz, the author states that:

almost all organized societies appear to have employed some mechanism such as preventive confinement for the purpose of incapacitating persons who are perceived to be dangerous but who cannot be convicted for a past offense... The more a society circumscribes the formal criminal process with very tight safeguards that make criminal convictions difficult, the greater the likelihood that many dangerous persons will manage to benefit from these safeguards.

In American society, legal procedures delegated as “civil” are used to achieve greater leeway in the uses of preventive confinement. “By resorting to legal word games and verbal gymnastics, that which we would not and could not do to persons convicted of serious crimes and judged to be deserving of punishment, we manage to do quite readily to those designated as the recipients of our benevolence.”

Slavery and the Poor

J.H. Plumb

“Slavery, Race and the Poor.” In In the Light of History. New York: Dell Publishing Co. 1974, pp. 102–113.

Although racism against blacks in America aggravated the mistreatment of slaves and subjected freed blacks to an unequal color caste, it was more an excuse than a cause of slavery. Virulent forms of English xenophobic racism, having no causal link with slavery, had previously been directed against the Dutch, French, and Irish. A more balanced view of American social history dealing with black-white race relations is needed to supplement the insights of such works as W.D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968); Black History: A Reappraisal, Melvin Drimmer, ed. (1968); American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, Allen Weinstein and F.O. Gatell, eds., (1968); and Michael Banton, Race Relations (1968).

In reality, the evils of American and English slavery grew from the more general evil of social subordination of servants, workers, the poor, and slaves a like. Both the poor and slaves suffered similar social oppression over the centuries because both groups could be exploited as cheap sources of labor and wealth. The early English slave codes, in fact, resembled legislation to control the Elizabethan jobless poor. The similarities between the treatment of slaves and the poor allow us to see how normal slavery could appear to an earlier society.

Slavery occasioned tensions among America's founding fathers who evaded or postponed the question of abolition. Slavery for the American revolutionaries represented a conflict between the natural rights of all men and the Lockean holiness of property. After 1800, two forces were at loggerheads: the revolutionary heritage of freedom or equal rights and fears about the effects of black emancipation on family life and the social order. Thus, even though slavery might be abolished, racism would continue.

The crucial question of why abolition gained so strong a social support is answerable by again looking at the status of the working class poor. In England the most pronounced antislavery movement occurred among the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. Quaker industrialists and other businessmen formed a new attitude toward the poor working class. From the perspective of Adam Smith, workers in modern industries would be more productive if they received more incentives, better skills, and improved conditions. Josiah Wedgwood and other imaginative industrialists experimented with higher wages and better working conditions for their workers. Spurred by the incentives of self-interest, workers had great advantages in production over unfree slaves. In the new industrial society, the poor gradually turned into the working class.