The Preventive Detention of “Dangerous” Sex Offenders in Australia: Perspectives at the Coalface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four Australian states, Queensland, New South Wales, Western Australia and Victoria as well as the Northern Territory have enacted laws that enable the continued detention in prison of “dangerous” sex offenders beyond the completion of their sentence. This has proved to be a popular response from a political and social policy perspective, with the New South Wales government recently extending its scheme to include serious violent offenders. While the Queensland scheme has been upheld by the High Court of Australia as constitutional, preventive detention laws raise human rights issues and problems with implementation. This paper outlines the results of 86 interviews carried out with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, former corrective services officials, lawyers and police officers who have firsthand experience with the operation of the Australian schemes. The results indicate that those at the “coalface” in relation to post-sentence preventive detention schemes are critical of a number of matters such as the general reliance on preventive detention rather than rehabilitation, the reliance on and use of risk assessment tools as well as media reporting of sex offenders.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".