Letter from Thomas Meyer-Falk, a comrade who has been imprisoned in Germany since 1996 for bank robbery to fund political struggles.
In 1933 the Nazis passed the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, allowing the courts to indefinitely imprison “habitual criminals” if they consider the person to be dangerous to society: so since 1933 the state can keep people in prison after their regular sentence has finished. In the 50s, the High Court of GDR (East Germany) declared that the law had to be overruled, because it was a “Nazi concept”, but such doubts never existed in West Germany; the Federal Constitutional Court has always accepted PD (Preventative Detention).
However in 2011 the courts declared the conditions in the PD prisons to be a violation of the German constitution. The inmates have finished their sentences, the court said, so their living conditions have to be better than in a regular prison, and the state has to do its best to ensure that any inmate gets a realistic chance for parole as soon as possible, also offering therapy to the inmates.
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