Every country of the world struggles with the problem posed by that small group of dangerous criminal recidivists whom the public perceives to be so threatening. The countries reviewed are Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. Internationally, criminal law has two approaches to countering dangerous, habitual offenders: first, by increasing the length of imprisonment and the severity of sentences; and second, by providing measures for preventing crime and for the rehabilitation of offenders in addition to prescribed penalties. The trend in the countries reviewed is toward the use of longer prison sentences and the use of therapy-oriented measures. Measures aimed at prevention and imposed in addition to the prison sentence seem to be losing their popularity. The major problem with prevention measures has been the unreliability of predicting which offenders will become recidivists. The problem with using criminal histories to determine sentence lengths is that by the time a recidivist pattern is clear, the offender has usually passed the peak of his offending, such that longer sentences have little impact on crime rates. 217 footnotes