Fingerprints: Murder and the Race to Uncover the Science of Identity. Colin Beavan
Not all eighteenth-century criminals suffered such endless torture. In lower-profile cases, judges sometimes broke from the law and showed mercy. But this discretionary sentencing turned the judicial process into a sort of high-stakes crap shoot. For the same crime, depending on the judge, one lucky outlaw might be exiled to America, while another might be tortured or killed. This uneven application of the law undermined its moral authority. It was for this reason, not because of compassion for the condemned, that Europe’s great legal thinkers finally called for change.
In 1764, the Milanese statesman Cesare Beccaria published Dei deletti e delle pene (Crimes and Punishment) a seminal book on criminology. It sparked a hundred years’ worth of legal reforms, leading, eventually, to a system that could not operate without an infallible method of identification, such as fingerprinting. A twenty-six-year-old aristocrat, trained in law at the University of Pavia, Beccaria argued that, because of piecemeal development over several centuries, criminal law was an irrational mishmash. Prescribed punishments bore no relation to the seriousness of their crimes. “Whomsoever sees the same death penalty, for instance, decreed for the killing of a pheasant and for the assassination of a man … will make no distinction between the crimes,” Beccaria wrote.
Criminal law needed a massive overhaul. Beccaria called for standardized punishments that were only severe enough to make would-be criminals think twice. The certainty of a punishment, not its severity, had the greatest deterrent effect, he said. A burglar, positive of being caught and sent to jail, even for a short time, was less likely to commit a robbery than one who, if caught, might be executed.
Beccaria’s writing inspired humanitarian reformers across Europe. In England, philosopher Jeremy Bentham took up Becarria’s cause in a 1789 book of his own, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He argued that the object of all legislation should be the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” A punishment should not inflict any more unhappiness than the crime it was designed to deter. By this standard, executing thieves and other petty criminals was immoral.
For one of Bentham’s disciples, Samuel Romilly, the end of the death penalty became a quest. The Member of Parliament campaigned tirelessly to reform the Bloody Code and to rid the law of its overbearing cruelties. In 1808, he won a victory when he championed legislation abolishing the death penalty for pickpockets. But Romilly didn’t live to see the other fruits of his labors. Heartbroken by the death of his wife, he committed suicide in 1818 at the age of sixty-one.
Between 1832 and 1834, the English Parliament abolished the death penalty for shoplifting a value of five shillings or less, forgery of coins, returning from deportation, letter-stealing, and religious sacrilege. By 1861, only four offenses would be punishable by death: murder, treason, piracy with violence, and arson of royal dockyards. The hangman had seen his day.
Around the continent, prisons sprang up to house criminals spared by the less-often-employed gallows. England’s first national penitentiary, Millbank, in London, locked the cell door on its first prisoner in 1816. Pentonville Prison came in 1842, and by 1848, around the country, England had erected fifty-four new prisons, providing 11,000 new cells. In the previous century, prisons had housed only debtors and unfortunates awaiting their turns at trial or the gallows.
Early in the reign of the jailkeeper, in the 1820s and 1830s, crime statistics made their first appearance. They revealed the existence of a breed of hardened outlaws who, no matter how often they went to jail, always returned to their villainous ways. As a social phenomenon, the group quickly attracted the interest of science. Why would this group, in spite of the risks, return again and again to their lawbreaking? Were they bad in their very essence? Or was society somehow to blame?
One of the world’s first demographers, the Belgian Lambert Adolphe Quételet, took up these questions. Quételet analyzed three years of French crime statistics, and he published his findings in his 1835 book Sur L’homme (known in English as A Treatise on Man, and the Development of His Faculties). A third of murders, he found, occurred during barroom brawls. Young working-class men accounted for the greatest proportion of crime. Upper-class villains tended more toward personal violence than theft.
His great criminological discovery was the connection between crime rates and social conditions. When the economy dipped, law-abiding citizens suddenly started stealing. Old thieves stole more often. Crime waves and economic recessions correlated so closely that felons appeared to have no free will. It was as if, in bad times, some societal puppeteer began pulling their strings. Quételet concluded that the blame for lawbreaking belonged partly to society. The severity of a criminal’s punishment should therefore depend on the circumstances of his crime.
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