‘In our society we have no major crimes… but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals,’ explains the head of the Precrime agency in Philip K. Dick’s short story The Minority Report. In a case of life imitating art, the Victorian parliament is this week debating a bill to give ‘authorised officers’ the power to detain ‘high risk’ people, not because they have done anything wrong, but because the authorised officers suspect they might do so at some point in the future.