Italian classicist Cesare Beccaria

Cesare Beccaria was an Italian classical criminologist. Beccaria was the most advanced thinker of his time. Beccaria was born in Milan, but studied in Parma (Tuscany/Italy). In 1764, he publicizes his essay "On crimes and punishments" showing his views how the medieval criminal justice system should reform itself.  Cesare Beccaria was an Italian nobleman and also a doctor of criminal law. Beccaria was influenced by the French encyclopedic movement and accepted Montesquieu's and J.J. Rousseau's teachings. Some of Beccaria's principles are even accepted today. Unfortunately, Cesare Beccaria's  principle of property threshold regarding the fines wasn't very welcomed. Cesare Beccaria was the first who thought about it that fines should be proportionally applied according to the property threshold of the perpetrator, i.e. SES (socio-economic status). Beccaria stated that main reason for proportionality was in social responsibility.


bill of rights
                                                                    
Being rich isn't rule, but an exception. The more people are rich. The higher are theirs social responsibilities. Wealthy people also enjoy higher social standing, so it is an imperative for the wealthy to provide industrial production capacity and infrastructure (non-service sector) that those with lesser social standing can earn their wages, and the wealthy can keep their profits.

Then again, financial and monetary sector is very different today, than it was back then. Even with best efforts to invest in production industry, it cannot be compared with high yield investment profits in bogus non promissory, but legal debt based payment instruments. Profits in the production sector are about 7%, while in money lending and investment businesses they are about 70% trough the system of the credit, currency issuance and fractional banking scheme.

Unfortunately, Beccaria didn't lived in a corporate world either or in the time when the banks of issue legally counterfeited money. Also Beccaria didn't lived in the world where the rich used charity funds for tax exemptions and gave  their pennies to the poor.


Principles that Beccaria found most important were:


1.  proportionality of fines compared to social economic status
2.  absolute rule of law (without extensive judicial sentencing practice or court casinos)
3.  laws are condition of freedoms
4.  just society is based upon fair sentences
5.  concept of indeterminism
6.  advocated against use of death penalty
7.  concept of the free will

Differences in theoretical approaches between classical  and positivist criminology are:

Classical criminology uses philosophy and logic to explain a crime. Classical criminology was influenced by philosophical thinking's of Rousseau, Voltaire, Feurebach, Kant, Hegel and Bacon. Crime is a logical syllogism or just a simple choice. Classicist focus on crime, but not on the perpetrator of crime.


Beccaria criticized against of use of torture and secret judicial proceedings. He also advocated for abolition of the death penalty, while Bentham worked on the systematic codification of criminal law.  Jeremy Bentham was an advocate against of the excessive severity used in punishments of perpetrators, which were prescribed in the criminal laws of his time. Some of Bentham's ideas were implemented into laws. Bentham teachings have laid the groundwork for substantial legal reforms, and were spread by Bentham’s followers.

Lombroso believed that the true criminal can be identified simply by observation of certain physical traits such as a long lower jaw, asymmetric cranium, and other. Positivist use available scientific methods of that time such as anthropometric measuring, phrenological measuring, intuitive thinking, retrospective interview about prison inmates or asylum inhabitants and many other methods. They focus its research on the criminal. Theory of a born criminal was created by Cesare Lombroso largely thanks to his anthropometric and phrenological researches, which brought him to false conclusions. Even today scientists in analyzing and constructing crime theory can make mistakes like Lombroso.