Persons who are dangerous and legally responsible, but who have not yet
committed any currently recognised criminal offence, fall within the gap left between the
domains of criminal justice and civil commitment. Many jurisdictions operate legal
regimes that permit the detention of such persons in order to prevent the occurrence of
anticipated criminal harms. These regimes often either fail to respect the principle of
proportionality or contradictorily treat a dangerous offender as both legally responsible and
not responsible at the same time. In response to these problems, a number of preventive
detention models have been proposed. Retributivist models seek to prevent the occurrence
of anticipated criminal harms by requiring blame on the dangerous person’s part in order to
warrant detention. However, these models are ill-equipped to deal with the problem of
coextensiveness; i.e., they struggle to comprehensively reconcile proportionality in punitive
sentencing with the period over which dangerous persons remain dangerous and during
which one might therefore want them to be incapacitated. In order to achieve comprehensive
incapacitation of dangerous persons for the duration of their dangerousness, retributivist
models are forced to abandon their fidelity to proportionality in punitive
sentencing, thereby losing themselves in the process. Accordingly, if the practice of preventive
deten

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• ‘If the Cloak Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit’: Retributivist Models of Preventive Detention and the Problem of Coextensiveness