Modern criminal justice grew out of a Milan club called the Academy of Fists
In the 1760s a group of young Milanese aristocrats mocked Italy's stuffy academies by naming their own after fistfights. Out of their talk came a slim 1764 book by Cesare Beccaria attacking torture, secret accusations and the death penalty. It helped found criminology and, one scholar argues, deeply influenced America's founders.
Beccaria was born in Milan in 1738, the son of a middling aristocrat in the Habsburg realm. Schooled by Jesuits in Parma, he took a law degree at Pavia in 1758. Mathematics came easily, but reading Montesquieu steered him to economics, and his first publication in 1762 diagnosed the chaotic currency of the Milanese states and proposed a cure.
Friendship with the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri changed his course. Their circle, the Accademia dei pugni, joked that its relaxed debates sometimes ended in scuffles, and much of the talk concerned criminal justice. Through it Beccaria read Diderot, Hume, Montesquieu and above all Helvétius. Pietro was researching the history of torture, and Alessandro worked as a prison official who had seen dreadful conditions first-hand; both fed material into On Crimes and Punishments.
The book, the peak of the Milan Enlightenment, offered some of the first modern arguments against capital punishment and was the first full work of penology. It objected to confession by torture, anonymous accusations, judges' arbitrary discretion, unequal sentences and favours for the well connected. Beccaria rested his case on two ideas: punishment is justified only to protect the social contract, and the right penalty is the one that does the most public good. It reads more as advocacy than as the dense theory of Hugo Grotius or Samuel von Pufendorf.
It was quickly translated into French and English. The French translator André Morellet, in 1765, cut, added and reshuffled chapters so heavily that his version became almost a different book, and because Beccaria wrote that he fully agreed, scholars long assumed he endorsed the changes. Two rival arrangements of the text still circulate. Beccaria, who died in 1794, is now called the father of modern criminal law.
Source: Cesare Beccaria
