On Crimes and Punishments

Before writing this post I thought way back to when this course started and began charting the movement of crime and punishment in the class—from Foucault, who talked about punishment moving from the body to the mind and how incarceration can alter a person’s identity; to Defoe, who wrote in Moll Flanders about Moll’s time in Newgate and the misery of being there; to, now, Beccaria, who says in On Crime and Punishments that the purpose of punishment “is nothing other than to dissuade the criminal from doing fresh harm to his compatriots and keep other people from doing the same” (23). Trying to make sense of the arc set out and how Foucault relates to Beccaria, after a quick search I read that the French philosopher Voltaire influenced the Italian Beccaria. This makes sense because I see a lot of Enlightenment language in the text and the period in which the text was written coincides with the movement.

If my memory serves me correctly, Dr. Cervantes read a passage from Hutchinson where he argued for the need of a society where people employ a moral sensibility versus being ruled by vice to conduct their lives. I know moral sensibility doesn’t equate to reason, which is what Beccaria seems to be appealing to; but in drawing from the correlation of a moral society to stability, Beccaria seems to imply that the use of reason leads to achieving the same stability that Hutchinson proposed. So in laying out the origins of punishment, the balance between crimes and punishments, the forms of punishment, and other related topics, Beccaria unfolds his argument for the necessity for effective and objective justice. If punishment is supposed to make crime seem less appealing, then it would make sense for a person not to be a repeat offended. This theory puts a lot of faith in people and assumes people are reasonable. That’s not to say Beccaria’s argument is all for not, but today’s society is a great indicator it doesn’t really work that well.