Pre-crime policies in Japan and Russia prior to World War 2 reveal uncanny similarities to the UK’s Prevent strategy and relied on the same social elements to be acceptable.
By Zara W. Tahir
The Prevent strategy has often been referred to as a ‘pre-crime’ strategy. Pre-crime is defined as a grey area where a crime has not yet occurred, and yet is implicitly understood to possibly occur. Its origins lie in science fiction.
A study by Lucia Zedner at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies states that pre-crime,
“… has a tendency to validate developments that ought properly to be subject to intense debate. It licences changes in procedural arrangements, as well as in substantive law, that erode civil liberties and permit intrusive coercive measures to be imposed ahead of wrongdoing.”
People express surprise that such a policy has arisen in the UK. But Prevent is not without precedent in history; similar policies have been put in place in other countries in the past.
Pre-crime policies in history: Japan’s tenko system
In 1928, the Japanese imperial government was intent on preventing challenges to what was known as kokutai, or national polity (the structure and ideology of the imperial government).
Max Ward in his book Thought Crime: Ideology & State Power in Interwar Japan (2019) describes how the Home Minister at the time identified foreign thought (gairai shisō) – ideologies like communism, anarchism, and anti-imperialism – as the enemies of national polity.
Like today’s term ‘extremism’, the Japanese rulers developed a term – shisō hanzai (“thought crime”) – to refer to these crimes.
Ward also reveals how those who committed shisō hanzai had to be converted back to imperial thought through a process known as tenko (to “change direction” or re-align to supporting the imperial state), rather like our “de-radicalisation” process in Channel.
That year, 3426 people were arrested and in 1929, 4942 people were arrested. As the numbers continued to grow, a whole infrastructure developed around the concept of tenko.
Individuals known as thought procurators arose and, like Prevent officers, they decided if an individual would advance to trial, or if the indictment would be suspended until further notice. These procurators, Ward writes, kept detailed records on individuals, and when necessary converted them (or de-radicalised them) through tenko.
Eventually, tenko was largely seen as a failure, mainly because its aims were seen to be not only repressive, but overly ambitious.
Pre-crime policies in history: Russia’s corrupted legislature
At a similar time, in 1922, Russia criminalised what was called ‘anti-Soviet agitation’.
In her book, The Crime of “Anti-Soviet Agitation” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s (1998), Sarah Davies writes that ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ was defined broadly as any and all “call[s] to overthrow the power of the Soviets”.
Just like Prevent’s definition of extremism has widened, the breadth and vagueness of the Soviet definition facilitated what the politician and jurist Nikolai Krylenko described as “the elasticity of our punitive policy” (Davies, 1998).
Not surprisingly, 5322 people were arrested that year. Five years later, the definition had been expanded even further, and ‘agitation’ was defined as “the activity of spreading of any idea amongst the masses”, while ‘propaganda’ was defined as their “private transmission”. By 1929, 51,396 people were arrested for anti-Soviet agitation, and numbers doubled two years later.
Davies writes that even though the Russian courts tried to resist this broad application of thought crime, by 1937 they had grown weak. Pre-crime policies were not only accepted in courts, but used to convict people.
Conditions required for pre-crime policies to be accepted
A Bolshevik revolutionary, Solomon Abramovich stated at the time that the massive increase of arrests in Russia in the 20s was rooted in fear, in which the state was seen to be justified in “[preferring] to overdo rather than underdo” (Davies, 1998).
Along with a pervasive fear, a state must convince the populace of the need for a “whole-society response” to the “enemy within”, phrases we are all-too familiar with when encountering new developments in Prevent.
In Russia, this manifested in the vagueness and broadness of the laws criminalising thought. Eventually, any act considered “a danger to society” was a crime. Crucially, this was fortified in the jurisprudence at the time so that “criminality … was replaced by social danger” in courts .
Prevent’s checklist: fear, us-them mentality and pre-emptive policing
The first factor that needs to be present for policies like Prevent to be broadly palatable is fear, often accompanied or previewed by sustained or perceived political instability.
It is well known that when populations are kept stunned or perpetually on edge, they are more likely to agree to a removal of rights when done for ostensible security imperatives.
The second factor is an inordinate focus on identity, which facilitates an us-them framing by the state, which is then able to easily identify an “enemy within”.
This heightened sense of instability, paranoia and identity politics, is then presented with a solution: to pre-empt violence by the named or implied “other”.
This is done by conflating an actual criminal offence with the possibility of one. In order to introduce “markers” of this new criminality, certain thoughts, beliefs and behaviours ordinarily considered legal become a “threat” or “risk”.
When the courts implement pre-crime policies over the rule of law
At this point, national security policies exit the traditional legal framework.
It is also when societies become unsafe, simply because the judicial system that adopts these policies or approves them within the legal architecture, is no longer protecting individuals. Rather, it has become politicised.
Today, certain courts can and have accepted pre-criminal logic through counter-terrorism legislation.
In Australia, one court stated that the threat of suspect communities subscribing to dissenting ideologies is enough to pre-empt crime, even if the “offender has not decided precisely what he or she intends to do.”
Pre-crime logic flouts long-standing judicial principles such as innocence before guilt, and they violate rights guarantees such as speech, thought and association.
It is also a fundamentally cynical and pessimistic view. As McCulloch and Wilson state in Pre-crime: Pre-emption, Precaution and the Future (Routledge, 2017): “Under pre-crime frames, futures are narrowed to suspicion and worst-case scenarios”.
Prevent’s shortcomings are the same as its historical predecessors
Prevent addresses “radicalisation”, which is indicated by certain beliefs and behaviours and thus forms the concept of “thought crime”. But there has been no consensus on the precise causes of radicalisation, so it is a shifting concept at its root.
Concurrently, in Anderson’s 2025 Lessons for Prevent report, he records an admission from the Home Office that there is “a lack of data and evidence about what actually works in terms of counter radicalisation and intervention” (para 4.65).
Anderson writes that “a set of Home Office slides states ‘In 2022/23, 90% of individuals left Channel with their radicalisation risk reduced’ but the Home Office was unable to identify for me where this data comes from”.
Nonetheless, the Prevent environment is maintained through the sustained environment of fear, an us-them mentality, and the notion that pre-emptive policing can make us safer.
The government’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) has stated that government representatives when speaking about “terrorism” stressed “threat” more than any other message, perpetuating an environment of fear.
Sustaining the us-them mentality
The “whole society response” sustains an us-them mentality through Prevent, since it is a duty on public service employees to report individuals under their care.
Even more broadly than our public services, in June 2020, the government introduced a 45-minute free online course called “CT training at your kitchen table”.
The “training” encouraged ordinary people to become counter-terrorism police by among other things talking to their families about counter-terrorism at meal times, and spotting what neighbours were putting in their bins.
This obsession with minutiae remains today in public services, eroding its trust and its function. A study in 2021 of 70 teachers found that there was a fear of “‘miss[ing] something’ that could be a sign of vulnerability to radicalisation”.
This means that teachers’ primary focus ceases to be on teaching, and becomes that of national security, of which they are not qualified.
Prevent has always identified Muslims as the suspect community. Heightened racism in policy and society also means Muslims are the main focus of Prevent.
Recent anti-migration statements and protests are kindling a new era of suspicion on Muslims and Islam.
The government would do well to consider the lessons of history, and adhere to long-standing principles of legal fairness so that our societies can have a genuine opportunity to be safe.
Photo by kawah kaos dakwah on Unsplash
