What is the true purpose of punishment? (Enlightenment-era penal philosophy as seen through Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment)

Cesare Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment, published in 1764, caused a stir in European intellectual circles when he argued that the purpose of punishment is not just retribution, but crime prevention and social stability. He proposed a system of punishment that preserves human freedom and dignity and promotes the common good.

 

Cesare Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment, published in 1764, had a great impact. The European intellectual community was fascinated by the new, logical arguments for punishment. Faithfully responding to the Enlightenment ideas of the time, which envisioned rational human beings in pursuit of freedom and happiness, Beccaria presupposed human beings as capable of weighing their interests and acting accordingly. People do not give away their liberty for the common good without a price; they agree to part with some of it in order to escape a state of perpetual war and enjoy the rest in peace. The sum total of their allotted liberties constitutes sovereignty, and the sovereign is entrusted with its management.
Beccaria argued that laws are best obeyed when they promote their own happiness. Laws, which are the condition for the formation and continuance of society, are best obeyed when they promote individual happiness, and punishment is set for lawbreakers for the general welfare. 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 offense, 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 the end, we see punishment 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.
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 law, he is credited with laying the groundwork for a shift away from retributivism, the idea of punishment as retribution, and toward general preventive justice, the idea of preventing future crimes from occurring. His ideas have had a major influence on many criminal law systems since then, and are an important theoretical foundation for modern penal systems. Beccaria’s arguments still provide deep insights into the purpose and practice of punishment today, and his work is considered essential reading for law students and sociologists.
As such, Crime and Punishment was a revolutionary work that led to a fundamental rethinking of the law and penal system of the time. Based on his deep understanding of human nature, Beccaria emphasized that the purpose of punishment is not merely retribution but prevention for social stability. His philosophy was that punishment should be a way to maximize the good of society as a whole while preserving human freedom and dignity.