CLASSICAL SCHOOL

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)

 In 1764, Beccaria published Dei Deliti e Delle Pene ("On Crimes

and Punishments") arguing for the need to reform the criminal
justice system by referring not to the harm caused to the victim,
but to the harm caused to society.
 In this, he posited that the greatest deterrent was the certainty of
detection: the more swift and certain the punishment, the more
effective it would be.
 It would also allow a less serious punishment to be effective if
shame and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing was a guaranteed
response to society's judgment.
 Thus, the prevention of crime was achieved through a proportional
system that was clear and simple to understand, and if the entire
nation united in their own defence.
 His approach influenced the codification movement which set
sentencing tariffs to ensure equality of treatment among offenders.
 Later, it was acknowledged that not all offenders are alike and
greater sentencing discretion was allowed to judges. Thus,
punishment works at two levels. Because it punishes individuals, it
operates as a specific deterrence to those convicted not to reoffend.
But the publicity surrounding the trial and the judgment of society
represented by the decision of a jury of peers, offers a general
 example to the public of the consequences of committing a crime.
If they are afraid of similarly swift justice, they will not offend.
 In his book "On Crimes and Punishments" Beccaria presented a
coherent, comprehensive design for an enlightened criminal
justice system that was to serve the people rather than the
monarchy.
 According to Beccaria, the crime problem could be traced not to
bad people but to bad laws.
 A modern criminal justice system should guarantee all people
equal treatment before the law. Beccaria’s book supplied the blue
print.
 That blue print was based on the assumption that people freely
choose what they do and are responsible for the consequences of
their behavior. Beccaria proposed the following principles:
 Laws Should Be Used To Maintain Social Contract:
“Laws are the conditions under which men, naturally independent,
united themselves in society. Weary of living in a continual state of
war, and of enjoying a liberty, which became a little value, from
the uncertainty of its duration, they sacrificed one part of it, to
enjoy the rest in peace and security.”
 Only Legislators Should Create Laws: “The authority of making
penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the
whole society united by the social compact.”
 Judges Should Impose Punishment only in Accordance with
the Law: “[N]o magistrate then, (as he is one of the society), can,
with justice inflict on any other member of the same society
punishment that is not ordained by the laws.”
 Judges Should not Interpret the Laws: “Judges, in criminal
cases, have no right to interpret the penal laws, because they are
not legislators….Everyman has  his own particular point of view
and, at different times, sees the same objects in very different
lights. The spirit of the laws will then be the result of the good or
bad logic of the judge; and this will depend on his good or bad
digestion.”
 Punishment Should be Based on the Pleasure/Pain Principle:
“Pleasure and pain are the only springs of actions in beings
endowed with sensibility….If an equal punishment be ordained for
two crimes that injure society in different degrees, there is nothing
to deter men from committing the greater as often as it is attended
with greater advantage.”
 Punishment Should be Based on the Act, not on the
Actor: “Crimes are only to be measured by the injuries done to the
society they err, therefore, who imagine that a crime is greater or
less according to the intention of the person by whom it is
committed.”
 The Punishment Should be Determined by the Crime: “If
mathematical calculation could be applied to the obscure and
infinite combinations of human actions, there might be a
corresponding scale of punishment descending from the greatest to
the least.
 Punishment Should be Prompt and Effective: “The more
immediate after the commission of a crime a punishment is
inflicted the more just and useful it will be….An immediate
punishment is more useful; because the smaller the interval of time
between the punishment and the crime, the stronger and more
lasting will be the association of the two ideas of crime and
punishment.”
 All People Should be Treated Equally: “I assert that the
punishment of a noble man should in no wise differ from that of
the lowest member of the society.”
 Capital Punishment Should be Abolished: “The punishment of
death is not authorized by any right; for….no such right
exists….The terrors of death make so slight an impression, that it
has not force enough to withstand forgetfulness natural to
mankind.”
 The Use of Torture to Gain Confessions Should be
Abolished: “It is confounding all relations to expect…that pain
should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and
 fibers a wretch in torture. By this method the robust will escape,
and the feeble be condemned.”
 It is Better to Prevent Crime than to Punish Them: “Would you
prevent crimes? Let the laws be clear and simple, let the entire
force of the nation be united in their defence, let them be intended
rather to favour every individual than any particular classes….
Finally, the most certain method of preventing crimes to perfect
the system of education.”

Perhaps no other book in the history in the history of criminology has

had so great an impact. After the French Revolution, Beccaria’s basic
tenets served as a guide for the drafting of the French Penal Code,
which was adopted in 1791.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

 Legal scholars and reformers throughout Europe proclaimed their

indebtedness to Beccaria, but none owed more to him than the
English legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
 Bentham had long and productive career.
 He inspired many of his contemporaries, as well as criminologists
of future generations, with his approach to rational crime control.
 Bentham devoted his life to developing a scientific approach to the
making and breaking of laws.
 Like Beccaria he was concerned with achieving “the greatest
happiness of the greatest number.” His work was governed by
utilitarian principles. 
 Utilitarianism assumes that all human actions are calculated in
accordance with their likelihood of bringing happiness (pleasure)
or unhappiness (pain). People weigh the probabilities of present
future pleasures against those of present and future pain.
 Bentham proposed a precise pseudo-mathematical formula for this
process, which he called “felicific calculus.”
 According to his reasoning individuals are “human calculators”
who out all the factors into an equation in order to decide whether
or not a particular crime is worth committing. This notion may
seem rather whimsical today, but at a time when there were over
200 capital offences, it provided a rationale for reform of the legal
system.
 Bentham reasoned that if prevention was the purpose of
punishment, and if punishment became too costly by creating more
harm than good, then penalties need to be set just a bit an excess of
the pleasure one might derive from committing a crime, and no
higher.
 The law exists in order to create happiness for the community.
Since punishment creates unhappiness, it can be justified only if it
prevents a greater evil than it produces. Thus, Bentham suggested
 if a hanging a man’s effigy produced the same preventive effect as
hanging the man himself there would be no reason to hang the
man.

In this context, the most relevant idea was known as the "felicitation
principle", i.e. that whatever is done should aim to give the greatest
happiness to the largest possible number of people in society. Bentham
argued that there had been "punishment creep", i.e. that the severity of
punishments had slowly increased so that the death penalty was then
imposed for more than two hundred offences in England . For example,
if rape and homicide were both punished by death, then a rapist would
be more likely to kill the victim (as a witness) to reduce the risk of
arrest.

Bentham posited that man is a calculating animal who will weigh

potential gains against the pain likely to be imposed. If the pain
outweighs the gains, he will be deterred and this produces maximal
social utility. Therefore, in a rational system, the punishment system
must be graduated so that the punishment more closely matches the
crime. Punishment is not retribution or revenge because that is morally
deficient: the hangman is paying the murder the compliment of
imitation.

But the concept is problematic because it depends on two critical

assumptions:
if deterrence is going to work, the potential offender must always act
rationally whereas much crime is a spontaneous reaction to a situation or
opportunity; and if the system graduates a scale of punishment according
to the seriousness of the offence, it is assuming that the more serious the
harm likely to be caused, the more the criminal has to gain.

In this context, note Bentham's proposal for a prison design called the
"panopticon" which, apart from its surveillance system included the right
of the prison manager to use the prisoners as contract labor.

Spiritualistic understandings of crime stem from an understanding of

life in general, that finds most things in life are destiny and cannot be
controlled, we are born male or female, good or bad and all our actions
are decided by a higher being. People have held such beliefs for all of
recorded history, “primitive people regarded natural disasters such as
famines, floods and plagues as punishments for wrongs they had done to
the spiritual powers” (Vold, G. Bernard, T. and Snipes, J. 1998). These
spiritual powers gained strength during the middle ages as they bonded
with the feudal powers to create the criminal justice systems. Under a
spiritualistic criminal justice system, crime was a private affair that was
conducted between the offender and the victim’s family. However this
method proved to be too revengeful, as the state took control of
punishment. Spiritual explanations provided an understanding of crime
when there was no other way of explaining crime. However, the problem
with this understanding is it cannot be proven true, and so it was never
accepted.

The main tenets of classical school of criminology why noted below

1.   Man’s emergence from the State’s religious fanaticism involved the
application  of  his reason as a responsible individual.

1. It is the ‘act’ of an individual and ‘not his intent’ which forms the
basis for determining criminality within him. In other words,
criminologists are concerned with the ‘act’ of the criminal rather than his
‘intent’. Still, they could never think that there could be something like
crime causation.

2. The classical writers accepted punishment as a principal method of

infliction of pain, humiliation and disgrace to create ‘fear’ in man to
control his behavior.

3. The propounders of this school, however, considered prevention of

crime more important than the punishment for it. They therefore,
stressed on the need for a Criminal Code in France, Germany and Italy
to systematize punishment for forbidden acts. Thus the real contribution
of classical school of criminology lies in the fact that it underlined the
need for a well defined criminal justice system.
4. The advocates of classical school supported the right of the State to
punish the offenders in the interest of public security. Relying on the
hedonistic principle of pain and pleasure, they pointed out that
individualization was to be awarded keeping in view the pleasure
derived by the criminal from the crime and the pain caused to the victim
from it. They, however, pleaded for equalization of justice which meant
equal punishment for the same offence.

5. The exponents of classical school further believed that the criminal

law primarily rests on positive sanctions. They were against the use of
arbitrary powers of Judges. In their opinion the Judges should limit their
verdicts strictly within the confines of law. They also abhorred torturous
punishments.

Thus classical school propounded by Beccaria came into existence as a

result of the influence of writings of Montesquieu, Hume, Bacon and
Rousseau. His famous work ‘Essays on Crime and Punishment’ received
wide acclamation all over Europe and gave a fillip to a new
criminological thinking in the contemporary west. He sought to
humanize the criminal law by insisting on natural rights of human
beings. He raised his voice against severe punishment, torture and death
penalty. Beccaria’s views on crime and punishment were also supported
by Voltaire as a result of which a number of European countries
redrafted their penal codes mitigating the rigorous barbaric punishments
and some of them even went to the extent of abolishing capital
punishment from their Penal Codes.

Contribution of Classical School Criminological Theories

The heritage left by the classical school is still operative today in the following
principles, each of which is a fundamental constituent of modern day perspective
on crime and punishment.

1) Provides a justification for the use of punishment in the control of crime.

2) Rational Punishments

3) Written laws

4) Deterrent Principle

5) Equality before the Law

6.) Hedonism (principle of pleasure and pain)

7.) penoptican principle and prison

Major Shortcomings of the Classical School

The contribution of classical school to the development of rationalized

criminological thinking was by no means less important, but it had its
own pitfalls.

1. The classical school proceeded on an abstract presumption of free

will and relied solely on the act (i.e., the crime) without devoting any
attention to the state of mind of the criminal.
2. It erred in prescribing equal punishment for same offence thus
making no distinction between first offenders and habitual criminals
and varying degrees of gravity of the offence.

However, the greatest achievement of this school of criminology lies in

the fact that it suggested a substantial criminal policy which was easy to
administer without resort to the imposition of arbitrary punishment. It
goes to the credit of Beccaria who denounced the earlier concepts of
crime and criminals which were based on religious fallacies and myths
and shifted emphasis on the need for concentrating on the personality of
an offender in order to determine his guilt and punishment. Beccaria’s
views provided a background for the subsequent criminologists to come
out with a rationalized theory of crime causation which eventually led
the foundation of the modern criminology and penology.