prudentialism. The government of prevention is a book about prevention and against prevention, which analyzes how in preventive rhetoric advice is confused with alarmism and open and manifest threats. Prevention is the Trojan horse of punishment. Prevention activates authoritarian passions. Legitimate defense is the technique to justify preventive violence. But also with prevention come discretionary powers, participatory community controls and police harassment. Prevention is a way of circumventing justice and exercising anticipatory punishment. Much of the contemporary punitivism that comes from above and from below is attached to the fetishism of prevention, to the preventive turn of everyday life, which is why it is so difficult to retrace punitivism.