Pope Francis warned in 2014 that pretrial detention is "another contemporaneous form of unlawful and hidden punishment, beyond a veneer of legality", in particular "when an early sentence is procured in an abusive manner, without conviction, or as a measure applied in case of a suspicion more or less based on a crime committed".
The pontiff gave this warning call to the delegates of the International Association of Penal Law. He said that there were then even "certain countries and regions of the world, where the number of un-sentenced detainees surpasses 50 percent of the total".
He did, however, call for "due caution" when dealing with the topic. Whilst he disagrees with preventive detention and is worried about conditions in prisons, he suggests that a lack of caution "runs the risk of creating another problem as serious as, if not worse than, the first: that of untried prisoners, convicted without applying the rules".
The pope's conclusion, after considering a number of other aspects of criminal justice, is that states should not be allowed "juridically or in fact, to subordinate respect for the dignity of the human person to any other purpose". "Respect for human dignity must serve not only to limit arbitrariness and the excesses of the agents of the State, but act as a guiding criterion for the prosecution and punishment of those actions which represent the most serious attacks against the dignity and integrity of the human person."