Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment had a major impact on the development of the modern criminal justice system by criticizing the harsh punishment practices of 18th-century Europe and proposing a rational, public-interest penal system that aimed to deter and prevent crime and replaced cruel punishment with rational, public-serving punishment.
Cesare Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment, published in 1764, had a profound impact. The European intellectual community was fascinated by the new, logical arguments about punishment. At the time, European societies were still reeling from medieval penal practices, and cruel and unusual punishments were becoming a social problem. Beccaria’s arrival attracted the attention of many as a solution to these problems.
Faithfully responding to the Enlightenment ideas of the time, which envisioned rational human beings pursuing freedom and happiness, Beccaria presupposed human beings as capable of weighing their interests and acting accordingly. People do not give up their freedom for the common good without a price; they agree to give up some of their freedom in order to escape a state of perpetual war and enjoy the rest in peace. The sum of their respective freedoms constitutes sovereignty, and the sovereign is entrusted with its management. Laws, therefore, which are the condition for the formation and continuance of society, are best obeyed when they promote the happiness of each, and punishments are set for law-breakers for the welfare of the whole. With this argument, Beccaria established the starting point that the exercise of the right to punish is inalienable.
In Beccaria’s view, punishment cannot undo the consequences of a crime. Nor is the purpose of punishment to torment human beings. The purpose of punishment is solely to deter the offender from doing harm again and to prevent others from doing the same. This is accomplished by ensuring that the harm inflicted by the punishment is at least slightly greater than the benefit of the crime, i.e., the loss to the public good. And to ensure that this trade-off is clear to all, the penalties must be clearly codified, with certainty of enforcement. In other words, punishment should be viewed as a barrier to crime. The height of this fence should vary depending on whether the crime is murder or theft. It should be proportional to the degree of harm to the public good. Any punishment beyond that is tyranny and unnecessary. Beccaria says. If the same punishment were applied to two crimes that cause different harms, the deterrent to the more serious crime would be lost.
He urges that the system be adapted to the fact that humans are sensuous beings. If the most cruel punishments are continually administered, society at large becomes desensitized to them, and when it finally sees them, it feels no more than the horror of imprisonment. It is not the severity of the punishment that has the greatest effect on the human psyche, but its duration. Witnessing death is a horrifying experience, but the memory of it is temporary, and it is argued that the prolonged sight of a human being deprived of freedom suffering atonement is a more powerful deterrent. Freedom, he argues, cannot include a life that is sacrificed to protect something more important. As such, Beccaria is understood as a humanist because he opposes cruel punishment, a utilitarian because he speaks of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and a social contractarian because he bases his arguments on consensus among free human beings.
In criminal jurisprudence, he is credited with laying the groundwork for breaking away from retributivism, the idea of punishment as retribution, and moving toward general preventive justice, the idea of preventing future crimes from occurring. Beccaria’s arguments have had a profound impact on modern criminal law systems, paving the way for various reform movements that emphasize the protection of human rights and the humanization of punishment. Beccaria’s ideas are still relevant today and continue to contribute to the development of the criminal justice system. Examining how his ideas have been applied in practice is an important guide to understanding the role of punishment in modern society.
