Preventive Detention in Germany - Status Quo and Developments

• In Event: Pre-Trial and Short Term Detention

Abstract

According to German Penal Law preventive detention is not a sanction but a care order for such offenders who are considered as very dangerous even after their prison term. In the last decades this measure has been highly controversial. Until the 1990s the number of such detainees has steadily decreased and many criminologists assumed a soon abolishment of preventive detention, but since then this measure experienced a renaissance and the number of inmates has increased again. In 2011 the German Constitutional Court has decided that the prison system has to offer a clinical treatment for detainees already in preventive detention and especially for those prison inmates who are destined for this, in order to end the care order as soon as possible or even make it unnecessary. In 2014 a national longitudinal survey on preventive detention in Germany started. This paper will present some data about the actual situation for the federal Land of Baden-Wuerttemberg and it will show in which way and to which extent the obligation for therapeutic measures has been fulfilled until now.

Author

• Joachim Obergfell-Fuchs, Academy for Prison Officers Stuttgart