Did the Supreme Court Just Deem 'Minority Report' Dystopopian Ideals Constitutional?

Did today's Supreme Court decision that "sexually dangerous" criminals can be indefinitely imprisoned move the U.S. justice system in the direction of a Stephen Spielberg dystopia? It sure seems like it.

In Spielberg's futuristic sci-fi thriller Minority Report (2002), Washington, D.C., is enjoying the success of its newly established Department of Pre-Crime, which harnesses the psychic abilities of hyperclairvoyant youth who can predict when a murder will take place. As soon as a homicide is predicted, a police squad springs into action, prevents the crime and then arrests the would-be perp for murder. The problem, of course, is that no murder has actually been committed; the state is able to arrest, convict, and punish people for crimes it is sure they would have committed, had the police not shown up. The psychics, you see, are never wrong.

Now, to our knowledge, the federal government has not acquired any psychics to predict future crimes, and even if it did, we assume that such predictions wouldn't be admissible in court. And yet, logic behind the legislation SCOTUS deemed constitutional today seems uncomfortably close to that of the movie's Pre-Crime proponents.

The decision specifically deals with the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. As The New York Times describes it:

The law allows the federal government to continue to detain prisoners who had engaged in sexually violent conduct, suffered from mental illness and would have difficulty controlling themselves. If the government is able to prove all of this to a judge by “clear and convincing” evidence—a heightened standard, but short of “beyond a reasonable doubt”—it may hold such prisoners until they are no longer dangerous or until a state government assumes responsibility for them.

Bloggers and legal writers are pointing out that the legislation is troubling enough by itself. It is not required, for instance, that a prisoner be convicted of and incarcerated for a sex crime (or any violent crime for that matter) in order to be deemed "sexually dangerous." An inmate in jail for tax fraud could, theoretically, be deemed a hazard to society and have his sentence indefinitely extended. It seems clear, as Alan DuBois, the attorney who represented the prisoners cited in the case, told CNN, that "the statute is not written constitutionally."

But perhaps the most unnerving part of this whole story is the following quote, taken from Solicitor General Elena Kagan's oral argument in favor of the statute back in January:

The federal government has mentally ill, sexually dangerous persons in its custody. It knows that those persons, if released, will commit serious sexual offenses. And it knows too that states are often not in a position to deal with such dangers, not in a position to take custody and care and responsibility for those persons upon release from federal prison. 

The federal government knows these prisoners will commit serious sexual offenses if they are released? How? Of course, despite the unfortunate wording of her quote, it's unlikely that Kagan was actually asserting the state's ability to predict recidivism with perfect accuracy. But until Spielberg's psychics make such a feat possible, it seems like the federal government should stay out of the business of preemptively punishing people for crimes they have not committed.

Apparently, the Supreme Court disagrees.