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punishment—indeed punishment of any sort—would soon be seen as similarly outdated. And even if reformers could not completely cure criminals, perhaps they could heal at least certain “degenerate” criminal types (at the time generally associated with blacks and swarthy immigrants) just enough to function in proper society.
    Today we know that prisons are not hospitals for the criminally ill (though prisons do house many mentally ill people, to horrible effect). At the time, however, many people hoped that we could purge criminality from a person’s system. The mantra of reformers became “treat not the crime, but the criminal.” Alas, crime is often an act of free will, and it happens most when people are angry, drunk, jealous, in need of money or a high, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human nature is not a virus or a genetic illness to be cured, and
thinking of crime in terms of degenerate biological types has led to some of the worst horrors humankind has seen.

    Cesare Beccaria, an Italian politician and philosopher, came up with the idea of deterrence in his 1764 Essay on Crimes and Punishments . Beccaria transformed theories of criminality. Contrary to popular beliefs, Beccaria posited that the Devil himself did not actually possess criminals. Instead, said Beccaria, people have free will to act rationally to serve their own self-interests. When crime paid less, he suggested, there would be fewer criminals. So in order to deter potential offenders, punishment must be swift, certain, and proportional to the crime.
    Despite the difficulties of putting Beccaria’s theories into practice, these notions of deterrence and crime prevention form the basis of what is now known as the classical school of criminology. Beccaria’s revolutionary ideas crossed the ocean to a receptive America. Over the past two centuries his concepts have worked their way into the very core of American justice and punishment. Reformers
wanted to create a modern system of justice appropriate for a newly independent and enlightened republic. In America the British system of execution and harsh flogging gave way to what was supposed to be a softer and reforming system of penitentiaries. Solitary confinement replaced the lash, and prison replaced public shaming. At the time, this all seemed like progress.
    As a founding father of criminology, Beccaria helped lay the cornerstone for the modern American justice system—but maybe he was wrong. Classic deterrence theory, like the more modern cost-benefit analysis, depends on a certain level of rational thought and long-term comprehension that seems to be lacking in criminals who are desperate, high, or mentally disturbed. There’s little evidence that most criminals consider possible punishment before committing a crime. They don’t think they’ll be caught. Academics continue to debate the root causes of crime, but crime prevention may rest less in grand sociological and economic theories than in effective policing and more informal social control.
    Although Beccaria came up with the groundbreaking notion that something could serve as a deterrent to potential criminals, the idea of putting
people into cells, supposedly for their own good, gets credited to John Howard, a well-off Calvinist born in 1726. Howard believed that isolation was the way to moral and physical salvation and knew firsthand how criminal knowledge and physical diseases spread in the filthy communal atmosphere of jail. In 1755 French privateers captured the ship Howard was on, and he was briefly imprisoned. Back home, in 1773, Howard was a county sheriff and found the conditions of the local jail appalling. He then visited hundreds of other jails and documented all of this in his extremely influential book, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales . Solitary confinement, he believed, provided an environment much more conducive to salvation and healing.
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