An editorial from Australia lambastes laws that lock people up after their prison sentence is over. The writer compares such laws with laws imposed in Nazi Germany.
The inherent unfairness of dangerous offender laws was summarised by great English jurist Tom Bingham. In The Rule of Law, published just before he died in 2010, Bingham, who had been the UK’s top judge, said detaining people without charge was “previously the hallmark of authoritarian regimes”.
Locking people away after they complete their sentence on the basis of predictions about reoffending…was a tool used by the Nazis in the 1930s, just as Bingham observed.
Read the full editorial here.