Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments: The Birth of Modern Criminal Justice

Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene), published in 1764, is one of the foundational texts of modern criminal law. The book, written when Beccaria was only twenty-six years old, subjected the criminal justice system of his time to a systematic critical examination, and it proposed a series of reforms that have become basic features of modern criminal law. This article examines the central arguments of On Crimes and Punishments and its lasting influence on the development of modern criminal justice.

The Critique of Contemporary Criminal Justice

Beccaria opens On Crimes and Punishments with a critique of the criminal justice system of his time. The system, he argues, was arbitrary, cruel, and ineffective. Punishment was not proportional to the crime; torture was used to extract confessions; the procedures were secret and unpredictable; the death penalty was applied to a wide range of crimes, including theft and forgery; and the entire system was designed to intimidate rather than to prevent crime.

Beccaria argues that this system was not only unjust but also ineffective. The spectacle of cruel punishment did not, in fact, deter crime; it only brutalized the public and corrupted the administrators of justice. A more rational system, based on the principles of certainty, proportionality, and humanity, would be both more just and more effective than the system it was designed to replace. For a fuller account of the place of these reforms in Beccaria’s broader political thought, see Beccaria; this article focuses on the specific arguments of On Crimes and Punishments.

The Principles of Punishment

Beccaria develops a theory of punishment based on three central principles. The first is the principle of proportionality — the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the seriousness of the crime. The second is the principle of certainty — the punishment should be certain, so that the connection between crime and punishment is clear to all. The third is the principle of humanity — the punishment should be humane, and should never be cruel or degrading. These three principles, taken together, constitute the foundation of Beccaria’s reform of criminal law.

These principles are derived from a more general theory of human motivation. Beccaria, drawing on the utilitarian tradition and on the new psychology of the Scottish Enlightenment, argues that human beings are motivated by a rational calculation of pleasure and pain. Crime is the result of a calculation that the pleasure of the crime outweighs the pain of the punishment. The proper role of the criminal law is to make the calculation come out differently, by ensuring that the pain of the punishment outweighs the pleasure of the crime.

The principles were revolutionary, and they were a direct contradiction of the traditional system of criminal justice, which had been based on the principles of vengeance, deterrence through terror, and the religious and moral corruption of the accused.

The Rejection of Torture

Beccaria’s rejection of torture is one of the most famous parts of On Crimes and Punishments. He argues that torture is inherently unjust, because it assumes that the accused is guilty before the conclusion of the trial, and because the pain of the torture may be so great that the accused will confess to crimes he did not commit.

The argument is grounded in a more general theory of the proper relationship between the state and the individual. The state, in Beccaria’s view, has no right to use methods that are inherently unjust, even if those methods are designed to achieve legitimate ends. The use of torture is a violation of the rights of the accused, and it is also a violation of the principles of the social contract. The argument was one of the first systematic rejections of the use of torture in the European legal tradition, and it had a profound influence on the subsequent development of modern criminal procedure.

The Rejection of Capital Punishment

Beccaria also argued against the death penalty. He argued that the state had no right to take the life of its citizens, and that the death penalty was neither necessary nor useful for the prevention of crime. The argument was based on the principle that punishment should be designed to prevent crime, and that lifelong imprisonment was a more effective deterrent than execution.

The argument against the death penalty was controversial in Beccaria’s time, and it remains controversial today. But the argument was an important step in the development of the modern critique of capital punishment, and it has been an important source of the contemporary movement for the abolition of the death penalty.

The Influence and Legacy

On Crimes and Punishments was one of the most widely read and most influential books of the late eighteenth century. Within a few years of its publication, the work had been translated into French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and many other languages, and it had been reprinted in dozens of editions.

The book had a direct influence on the criminal law reforms of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the abolition of torture in many European countries, the reduction of the categories of crime punishable by death, and the establishment of more rational and humane systems of criminal procedure. The book was particularly important in the American colonies, where the American revolutionaries cited Beccaria’s arguments against cruel and unusual punishment, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution is a direct descendant of Beccaria’s arguments.

Further Reading

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu), relevant entry
• The Cambridge Companion to [Thinker] (Cambridge University Press)
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969)