With the sentence passed on 1. According to the Federal Ministry of Justice, the comprehensive reform of preventive detention, which came into force on January 1, 2011, "curtailed the proliferation of numerous tightening measures of recent years". The aim is to consolidate primary preventive detention, expand preventive detention and largely abolish subsequent preventive detention.
– Primary preventive detention: this "normal" preventive detention is imposed in the vast majority of cases. It is already ordered with the sentence.
– The reserved preventive detention was introduced in 2002. This meant that the courts could initially only threaten preventive detention in the sentence. Before the end of the sentence, it was then decided on the basis of a dangerousness prognosis whether it was actually imposed.
– Subsequent preventive detention was introduced in 2004. This measure could be ordered under certain conditions only at the end of the period of imprisonment shortly before Entlang. Namely, when before the end of the execution of the prison sentence "new facts" for the dangerousness of the convict became apparent.
But such "new" facts for dangerousness were recognized by the courts only in rare cases. In January 2010, for example, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in a case involving a sex offender from Heinsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia that a "mere reassessment" of the man's sadistic personality was not a "new fact". In several cases, courts rejected requests for subsequent preventive detention, so that even demonstrably dangerous sex offenders were released – and therefore had to be monitored at great police expense.
– Since July 2008, the possibility of ordering subsequent preventive detention has also applied to offenders convicted under juvenile criminal law with a final sentence.
The number of people in preventive detention in Germany – mostly dangerous sexual or violent criminals – has risen in the past decade from 257 in 2001 to around 500 now, almost doubling.