The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology

Ruth Ann Triplett

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119011408, 9781119011354
• eBook ISBN: 9781119011378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Featuring contributions by distinguished scholars from ten countries, The Wiley Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology provides students, scholars, and criminologists with a truly a global perspective on the theory and practice of criminology throughout the centuries and around the world. In addition to chapters devoted to the key ideas, thinkers, and moments in the intellectual and philosophical history of criminology, it features in-depth coverage of the organizational structure of criminology as an academic discipline world-wide.

The first section focuses on key ideas that have shaped the field in the past, are shaping it in the present, and are likely to influence its evolution in the foreseeable future. Beginning with early precursors to criminology's emergence as a unique discipline, the authors trace the evolution of the field, from the pioneering work of 17 th century Italian jurist/philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, up through the latest sociological and biosocial trends.

In the second section authors address the structure of criminology as an academic discipline in countries around the globe, including in North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, and Australia.

With contributions by leading thinkers whose work has been instrumental in the development of criminology and emerging voices on the cutting edge The Wiley Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology provides valuable insights in the latest research trends in the field world-wide - the ideal reference for criminologists as well as those studying in the field and related social science and humanities disciplines.

Part I
Key Ideas, Thinkers, and Moments

Section 1
Precursors to Criminology as an Academic Discipline

1
Criminal Entryways in the Writing of Cesare Beccaria

Matthew P. Unger, Jean‐Philippe Crete, and George Pavlich

Introduction

As the subject for the opening chapter of this collection, Cesare Beccaria is a fitting choice. Not only is Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene [On Crimes and Punishments] a foundational text in classical criminology, which has received and continues to receive much attention, but significantly, he also calls us to focus on the need for changing entryways to criminal justice. This chapter will briefly allude to well‐trodden discussions of Beccaria’s work on rationalizing criminal justice terrains and calling for enlightened reforms of the contemporary penal institutions he examined. However, our aim is to highlight an overlooked, yet equally influential, contribution. Specifically, we argue that not only did Beccaria’s work offer an influential appeal for reason‐based public codes, criminal trials, and penal practices, but that it also called for political transformations at gateways to criminal justice arenas. That is, his work may also be read as advocating for publicly accessible, rationalized ways to accuse subjects of crime and so provide just gateways that decide which subjects at entryways ought to be admitted to criminalizing fora. In turn, his reforms imply that opening moments that lead to the creation of criminal subjects indicate a sovereignty politics with important consequences for modern state formations (Pavlich, 2000).

The focus of much scholarship surrounding Beccaria has centered on a variety of implications that attended to his attempts to rationalize criminal law, and his utilitarian justifications for the punishment of crimes (Ferrajoli, 2014). As is well known, he criticized and called for fundamental alterations to the arbitrary, cruel, secret, and discretionary processes of medieval criminalization. He strongly advocated for a system of penal laws that were public, reason‐based, consistent, universal, non‐discretionary, clear, and based neither on vengeance nor reprisal. These laws were to be codified and founded on principles of the public good and reason. As is well known, he developed these ideas at various levels. For example, he offered a philosophical and socio‐political analysis of the ways that a rational and minimalist image of criminal law and punishment should only be used to bring about a humane, just, and free social compact.

On this view, as Foucault has shown, Beccaria’s and Bentham’s writings took different trajectories and had different implications. Most important for our discussion, is that Beccaria sought to reframe, lessen, and rationalize the criminal justice system whereas Bentham sought to mine insights derived from the panopticon to help develop a disciplinary society (Foucault, 1977). He also developed a different conception of positive law from the one expressed by Bentham as

[an] assemblage of signs declarative of a volition conceived or adopted by the sovereign in a state, concerning the conduct to be observed in a certain case by a certain person or class of persons, who in the case in question are or are supposed to be subject to his power.

(Bentham, 1970, p. 1)

Where Bentham might be seen to understand that the law is given and enforced by the sovereign, several passages from On Crimes and Punishments suggest that, for Beccaria, the sovereign should be assumed as metonymic of law and state. At the same time, he felt that the foundation of law cannot derive from tradition, superstition, religion, or the discretion of judges or the vagaries of the sovereign. By contrast, Beccaria promoted a form of law based on a kind of metaphysics of rationality that provides images and statements about human nature and the ideal society. Therefore, it is perhaps useful to heed Garland’s (1985) assessment of Beccaria, Voltaire, Bentham, and Blackstone less as classical “criminologists” but more as legal scholars who applied the foundations of “legal jurisprudence to the realm of crime and punishment” (p. 14). In this light, Beccaria emerges not only as a legal philosopher, but also as a kind of activist concerned with recalibrating procedures, techniques, and apparatuses that bring people into the criminal justice system that necessarily frames the relationships between citizen and state.

On the latter, he provided hard‐hitting critiques of specific penal and criminalizing practices of his time. He also offered many specific ideas of how criminal justice might be recalibrated, from the already noted calls for clear public criminal codes and the removal of judicial discretion, to education, crime prevention, swift and certain punishment that was rationally calibrated as proportionate to the atrocity of specific crimes, and so on. Throughout, it is worth noting, he championed compassion and argued that to ensure that

[punishment] may not be an act of violence, of one or of many, against a private member of society, it should be public, immediate and necessary; the least possible in the case given; proportioned to the crime, and determined by the laws.

(Beccaria, 1819, p. 160)

Regardless, at all these levels, Beccaria’s relatively small text provided a trenchant call for reformist action that resonated throughout Europe, Russia, the USA and across many intellectual traditions and times (Bessler, 2009; Draper, 2000; Harcourt, 2013; Massaro, 1991). Indeed, Harcourt (2013) describes how Beccaria’s influence extended outwards in many directions and served as

an object of praise among utilitarians, a source of inspiration for classical English jurists, a target of pointed critiques by retributivists, the subject of histories and genealogies, the object of derision by the first économistes, rehabilitated and appropriated by the Chicago School.

(p. 2)

As influential as his Of Crimes and Punishment most certainly has been, we would argue that not all of its achievements have been recounted. In this chapter we will reinterpret relatively overlooked aspects of this work to highlight one element of Beccaria’s thinking: his call for rational and just reforms to entryways that determine admission to criminal justice. Stated more pointedly, we interpret Beccaria, in responding critically to the context that he faced, as seeking to restructure the discretionary, secret, spurious, irrational, tyrannical, arbitrary, and sovereignly ordered gateways wherein people were then accused of crimes and potentially entered into criminal justice arenas. Our aims here are first to situate his thinking as it pertains to such entryways before pointing to the kinds of reforms that his text seems implicitly to call for. Thereafter, we look at various political rationales that he provided for such reforms, before alluding briefly, by way of conclusion, to the political implications of our interpretative recovery.

Historical Context and Reception: Of Crimes and Punishment

A few years prior to writing his text, Beccaria had met Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Milanese brothers, and together they later formed Accademia dei Pugni or the Academy of Fists—a collection of Milanese intellectual elites who had tried to bring Enlightenment ideas to Italy, emphasizing how crime and punishment might be reconceptualized. More broadly, these elites—the “Milanese illuminisi”—sought to create

[a] bourgeois society that combined spiritual and moral regeneration with and through the materialist advantages of economic growth … envision[ing] a well ordered, hierarchical society whose reconstruction would emanate from an enlightened state administration that, though working in alliance with other powers such as the papal administration, could dominate all power blocs and would include all men of property and education.

(Beirne, 1993, p. 18)

The Academy of Fists was vital for Beccaria’s formation as a “legal scholar” through its at times heated philosophical debates inspired by the likes of Bacon, Diderot, Helvétius, Hume, Locke, and especially Montesquieu (Beirne, 1993). Reading these philosophers, members of the Academy of Fists wrote on a variety of subjects ranging from economic, political, social, aesthetic, to scientific concerns—all published in their journal, Il Caffè. The latter was designed to imitate the flamboyancy of French philosophical writings at the time and to embrace the critical edge that Enlightenment thinkers had forged across Europe, especially in France and Scotland (Beirne, 1993; Calisse, 2001). One of the members had access to the prisons which enabled some insight into prison conditions and the plight of contemporary prisoners (Maestro, 1973, p. 12). From their publications and many debates, Beccaria would learn about inquisitorial legal procedures and the inhumane conditions of confinement in Italy. This, no doubt, prompted his broad reformist agenda, but let us turn to specific examples.

Widely acclaimed by legal historians and philosophers, Beccaria reacted to outside forces: “two institutions, or rather two forces, had been the particular objects of his attacks …; the authority of the Roman law and reasons of State” (Calisse, 2001, p. 461). Beccaria championed humanism, reason, and rationality as the basis for reforming contemporary ecclesiastical entryways that centered on inquisitorial judgment. Beccaria viewed inquisitorial entryways to criminal justice as inhuman, irrational, baseless, and tyrannical. As he put it:

Those who are acquainted with the history of the two or three last centuries, may observe, how from the lap of luxury and effeminacy have sprung the most tender virtues, humanity, benevolence, and toleration of human errors. They may contemplate the effects of, what was so improperly called, ancient simplicity and good faith; humanity groaning under implacable superstition; the avarice and ambition of a few, staining with human blood the thrones and palaces of kings; secret treasons and public massacres; every noble a tyrant over the people; and the ministers of the gospel of Christ bathing their hands in blood, in the name of the God of all mercy.

(Beccaria, 1819, p. 27)

From this statement, one gleans his political commitment to humanism and tolerance and a wide rejection of superstition, ambitious sovereign agents, corruption, pre‐trial secrecy and post‐trial public violence, as well as cruel and tyrannical monarchical or ecclesial rulers. His calls for rational and secular interventions in criminal matters echoed the widespread Enlightenment transformations of medieval societies (see Beirne, 1993; Calisse, 2001; Maestro, 1973).

He addressed his critiques to a late medieval a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Key Ideas, Thinkers, and Moments
• Part II: Criminology across the Globe: The Organization and Structure of Criminology as an Academic Discipline
• Index
• End User License Agreement