Precrime

Precrime (today usually spelled "pre-crime") is a term coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed. Pre-crime has been defined as 'substantive coercive state interventions targeted at non-imminent crimes'. Pre-crime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats. The term pre-crime embodies a temporal paradox, suggesting both that a crime has not occurred and that the crime that has not occurred is a foregone conclusion (McCulloch and Wilson 2016).