One of the easiest ways to reduce crime is to shrink the footprint of the criminal law. The most obvious candidates are the parts of the criminal infrastructure that I have been calling the criminal legal system: pretrial detention, the war on drugs, parole and probation revocations, repeat offending laws, and so on. The best way to shrink the criminal legal system is to change the law so that violations of essentially regulatory rules do not lead to incarceration.

Chapter 7 shows that the struggles concerning the claimant’s potential ‘discretion’ have remained the same since Grahl-Madsen’s groundbreaking 1966 book. On the one hand, it may be the persecutor who defines what and who is persecuted. In this case, it is relevant whether harm is differentially inflicted due to the fact that the persecutor imputes or assumes a political opinion, irrespective of the claimant’s ‘actual’ convictions. On the other hand, it may be the claimant who defines group membership. Here, it is relevant whether the claimant has a deeply held political opinion. The task for the decision-maker is then to establish the deep conviction. The approaches do not necessarily map onto each other. When what is defined as the protected group does not equal the persecuted group as defined by the persecutor, ‘discretion’ logics emerge: Ultimately, in all these approaches, the protected group is made up of those who have been or are deemed at risk of being discovered by the persecutor – that risk being deduced either from their identity or their conduct, but always linked to their past or presumed future visibility. Those deemed ‘unrecognisable’ fall outside the protected group and are returned to (continued) ‘discretion’.