Medical Interventions as Criminal Remedies

Criminal offenders are sometimes required to undergo medical interventions that are intended, at least in part, to reduce the risk that they will re-offend. For example, drug-addicted offenders may be required to take medications intended to replace their drug of addiction and thereby prevent further drug-related offending. Similarly, sex offenders may be required to receive injections of testosterone-lowering drugs—so called ‘chemical castration’—intended to suppress their sex drive and thus prevent further sexual offending. In some cases, the imposition of these interventions is triggered solely by forward-looking considerations, such as the offender’s risk to others; it is not linked to any specific past criminal offence. In other cases, however, they are imposed by the criminal justice system as part of its response to a particular crime. In such cases, they are, in effect, used as supplements or alternatives to more traditional criminal remedies such as incarceration, fines, probation regimens, community service, and psychological rehabilitation programmes. Let us say that when medical interventions are used in this latter way, they are used as criminal remedies.1 The use of medical interventions as criminal remedies has, to date, been limited.2 However, on some influential views concerning the goals of criminal justice, there is good reason to take an interest in the possibility of more widespread use. These are anti-recidivist views—views according to which one of the goals of criminal justice is to prevent recidivism. Adherents of such views (henceforth, anti-recidivists) have reason to be disillusioned with traditional criminal remedies, for these are frequently poor at preventing recidivism. Indeed, the archetypal criminal remedy, incarceration, is notoriously poor. Although incarceration does help to prevent reoffending by separating offenders from most potential victims, it often does little to prevent