Through most of medieval Europe, punishment had almost nothing to do with the size of the offense. Death sentences were common for what today would be minor crimes; in England, even small thefts could send someone to the gallows. Someone who simply failed to repay a debt could be imprisoned indefinitely, with no real review of whether the punishment made any sense. Court proceedings were frequently secret, judges were often unjust, and officials took bribes as a matter of course. Punishment, in short, existed to be cruel and to demonstrate power – not to fit the crime.
The first person to seriously challenge this system, in writing, was a 26-year-old Italian nobleman with no legal or judicial experience at all.
A Young Aristocrat’s Book Changes Europe
Cesare Beccaria (1728–1791), an economist and philosopher caught up in the Enlightenment sweeping Europe, published Dei Delitti e Delle Pene (“On Crimes and Punishments”) in 1761. It was a slim book, and it moved fast: seven editions across Europe within six months, translations into English, German, Polish, Spanish, and Dutch within two decades. The English translation, published in 1780, was titled An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. Beccaria is remembered today as the father of the principles that still underpin criminal justice systems around the world.
Beccaria didn’t object to punishment itself. His argument was that punishment had lost all logical relationship to the crime it was meant to answer – and that a justice system without that relationship wasn’t really justice at all. He was the first major writer to call, in plain terms, for the complete abolition of the death penalty. His guiding idea borrowed the language of what would later be called utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number of people, achieved through laws that punish only as much as necessary to protect society, and never more.
The influence spread quickly and concretely. In England, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham built on and popularized Beccaria’s ideas; Bentham’s own student, the Member of Parliament Samuel Romilly, spent much of his political career trying to shrink the long list of offenses that carried a death sentence under English law. Russia, Sweden, and the Habsburg Empire all felt the book’s influence in their own legal reforms, and several American states drew directly on Beccaria’s principles when writing their own laws.
An Answer to a Changing World
Part of what made Beccaria’s ideas land was timing. European cities were growing, markets were expanding, and with them came crime risks that didn’t map neatly onto older, smaller, more traditional communities. Beccaria, Bentham, and reformers like John Howard were, in effect, searching for answers to problems that simply hadn’t existed at the scale they now saw – and they insisted on approaching those problems rationally, rather than through the inherited superstition and prejudice that had shaped punishment for centuries. Later positivist thinkers would go on to dismiss this approach as unscientific – guesswork dressed up as reason, in their view – and it was that dismissal that gave the movement its lasting name: the Classical School of criminology.
It’s worth being precise about what Beccaria actually was and wasn’t drawing on. He wasn’t working from some abstract, unexamined idea of free will. His thinking sat much closer to John Locke’s empirical psychology and the Scottish Enlightenment’s emerging “science of man” – the conviction that human behavior, like anything else in nature, could be studied, reasoned about, and legislated for accordingly.
Reading Character From the Face and Skull
Beccaria’s reforms opened the nineteenth century to entirely new ideas about human character and behavior, and to new medical and psychological fields built to study them. Physiognomy – the art of reading character from facial features, with roots reaching back to the seventeenth century and something like a formalized cousin of palm-reading – enjoyed serious standing in Europe well into the 1800s, championed by figures like Johann Kaspar Lavater, who tried to place it on scientific footing.
Early in the century, two further approaches followed the same logic in a different direction. Franz Joseph Gall introduced craniometry, the measurement of the skull, and Johann Spurzheim developed phrenology alongside it. Both rested on the idea that human character and behavior were the outward expression of specific mental faculties, each one seated in its own particular region of the brain – and that the shape of a person’s skull, molded around that brain, therefore revealed something real about their inner character. Both fields held genuine scientific credibility into the 1830s, before that credibility collapsed. But the underlying instinct behind them – that there might be a measurable, physical link between the body and criminal character – didn’t disappear with them. It resurfaced in a new field entirely: psychiatry.
The asylums built during the eighteenth-century reform era created a new medical specialty to staff them – first called “alienism,” then “psychological medicine,” and eventually psychiatry. Staff in these institutions began keeping detailed records of the patients admitted to them: their character, the nature of their apparent madness, the treatments attempted. That record-keeping tradition – systematic, long-term observation of individuals over time – produced an enormous amount of raw material, some of it, in cases involving what was then called hysteria, folded into early experiments in medical treatment for mental illness.
None of this research was cleanly separated from parallel work on morality or poverty; the underlying goal, in a broad sense, was tightening the state’s grip on the population it governed. It wasn’t yet criminology in any sense we’d recognize today – phrenologists and early psychiatrists were cataloguing human character in general, not studying the criminal as a distinct type of person. That narrower, more specific turn – treating the offender as a particular kind of human specimen, worth studying in his or her own right – didn’t happen until the very end of the nineteenth century. It took another Italian, a psychiatrist working half a century after Beccaria, to make that turn: Cesare Lombroso.
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