The latest Sun splash that has the Government promising tougher sentences for “lone wolf” killers has a depressingly familiar ring to it. Again, the political response to horror targets the wrong end of the chain: after the deaths, after the CCTV is reviewed, after the warnings are quietly brought to light in inquiries. We default to longer sentences and harsher tariffs because the cost is lowest there — no civil liberties argument for those already convicted.

Yet in operational terms, whether the perpetrator of a mass-casualty attack serves 35 or 45 years is almost entirely beside the point. What matters is the period immediately before the killing: the months or years in which an individual is signalling, online and on the streets, that they are moving from fantasy to intent. By the time a sentencing judge enters the story, prevention has already failed, and only retribution remains.

Across the West, “lone actors” now constitute a large share of the terrorist and extremist threat. They are often submerged in toxic online subcultures, have chaotic personal histories and florid mental health symptoms. Here they seem to be intermittently and ineffectually handled by the authorities, too often failing to trigger a decisive intervention. In Britain, that pattern is painfully exposed by recent outrages. The phrase “known to the authorities” has become a macabre refrain in the aftermath of bloodshed.

If we are serious about protecting the public, we have to accept that the most controversial tools must be used at the front end of the risk, not after harm has been done. That means three things: more intensive surveillance of a small, high-risk cohort; much better data-sharing between police, security services, mental health and social care; and, in extremis, compulsory internment of highly dangerous individuals where the risk is acute and properly evidenced.

This is not as alien to liberal democracies as the criminal justice commentariat would like to pretend. Germany, so often cited for its constitutional wariness of state power, has long used Sicherungsverwahrung — preventive detention — to continue holding a tiny number of offenders after they have served their sentences if they are assessed as posing a grave, ongoing danger. It is ordered by courts, subject to regular review and falls under the supervision of a constitutional court that has repeatedly tightened the criteria. There are arguments to be made about proportionality and safeguards, but it would be wrong to suggest that such regimes are incompatible with democracy.

The UK, too, already lives with preventive logic. Control Orders and their successors, Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs), severely restrict the liberty of individuals on the basis of risk rather than conviction, through curfews, electronic monitoring and relocation. We accept this in the counter-terrorism sphere because we’ve learned that waiting passively for a prosecutable offence has awful consequences. Extending that honesty to a very small number of disorganised but manifestly dangerous people is not a wild leap; it is a coherent next step.

Clearly, there are serious dangers here. Preventive detention, whether pre-trial or post-sentence, invites mission creep and injustice if it is not tightly constrained, transparently overseen and sparingly used. But that is an argument about design, not about principle. The principle has already been conceded. The practice needs to be extended.

The alternative is the status quo: periodic massacres by men the state already had in its sights, followed by ritualistic announcements of tougher sentences that can only ever apply to those we have already failed to stop. Until we are prepared to detain the most dangerous before they act, talking tough on sentencing is not protection — it is pretence.

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Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain’s Prison Crisis and How To Escape it.

NotThatBigIan

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