Cesare Beccaria & Punishment Essay

Cesare Beccaria was an Italian jurist, enlightenment thinker, and philosopher. In 1794, he wrote On Crimes and Punishment. In this book, he talked against torture and the death penalty, but he was most famous for displace a foundation of penology, which deals with the repression of nefarious activities and penalization of crimes committed. Beccaria was most famous for declaring that a punishment should fit the crime. He meant several things by this, but most importantly was his two main shoot fors. This first way he verbalise that the punishment should fit the crime is that the stiffness of punishment should line of latitude the severity of harm resulting from the crime. This did non mean that if soul was a murderer, that they should be im mortalate to death. Beccaria publicly condemned the death penalty because he said that the state does not possess the right to take lives, and that it is not a very multipurpose form of punishment. He stood for a more(prenominal) deter rent function of the penal arranging. When he said it must match the damages of the offense and parallel the harm of the crime, he was more referring along the lines of punishment and incarceration.His second point was that the punishment should be severe enough to outweigh the pleasure of committing the crime. For example, someone might look at sexual assault as pleasurable, so the punishment needs to be severe enough for that person to think, Wow, the punishment is harsh, its not worth committing this crime. If this wasnt the case, a rational person would weigh the gain with the consequence, and determine that the crime is worth committing because if thats all my punishment, then why not. People speed because speeding tickets are plainly fines, if you were to be booked and incarcerated, Im sure people would speed less. Not registering that this is how it should be, its just the most blatant example. The task with this second point is that it only applies to rational thinkin g people, and it doesnt authentically apply at all to a violent criminal with a psychological imbalance and is mentally handicapped who doesnt think things through and through before they do them.Luckily, this is why we, in the United States, have trials because Beccarias surmise, all though it does make sense, cannot apply to every single criminal and will not deter every type of crime or offender. This makes one think on how our current laws and punishments line up with the theory of Beccaria. especially in the terms of drug laws. 55% of criminals in federal prisons and 20% in state are all from drug cogitate crimes. This is an extremely high number of people for a simply, usually victimless offense. If the offenders only damage done is to him or herself, then is it totally necessary that the county spends on average, $28,000 a year per criminal in the system?At what point do we draw the line and see that privatization of prisons is do people rich because were putting far to o many another(prenominal) criminals in prisons as opposed to other forms of punishment. Would it not make more sense for a commiter of a victimless crime be sentenced to something ilk password or house arrest where the only person theyre trustworthy for is themselves, and they can carry on their every day life quite of being exposed to more hardened criminals and having to conform to prison edict? This leads one to question numerous things such as the effectiveness of punishments like the death penalty along with the effectiveness of other forms of punishment and say do these really match the crime applied to them?Intro. to Criminal jurist 5th edition, Bohm/Haleyhttp//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Crimes_and_Punishmentscite_ref-2 http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Beccariahttp//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penology