If interpretation of the laws is an evil, it is obvious that the obscurity which makes interpretation necessary is another. And it is the greatest of evils if the laws be written in a language which is not understood by the people and which makes them dependent upon a few individuals because they cannot judge for themselves what will become of their freedom or their life and limbs, hindered by a language which turns a solemn and public book into what is almost a private and family affair. What are we to think of mankind, seeing that such is the long-standing practice of the greater part of educated and enlightened Europe? The more people understand the sacred code of the laws and get used to handling it, the fewer will be the crimes, for there is no doubt that ignorance and uncertainty of punishment opens the way to the eloquence of the emotions.

One consequence of the foregoing thoughts is that, without the written word, a society will never arrive at a fixed form of government, in which power derives from all the members and not just from a few, and in which laws which are unalterable except by the general will, are not corrupted as they make their way through the throng of private interests. Experience and reason have taught us that the credibility and reliability of human traditions diminish the further we get from their origins.

§31. With the burgeoning of commercial activity, the concentration of land in the hands of a small number of people, the accumulation of capital by a few individuals, and, in short, the inequality of wealth, men developed a new way of utilising that wealth. For a large proportion of humankind drag out their wearisome life and keep their miserable family alive in humble obscurity, without the pangs of envy. Many can live more expansively and enjoy a certain ease and comfort; they can also show off to others and cut a figure with elegance and the trappings of power with which they tacitly intimidate those poorer than themselves and assert their dominance over them. Some few are so rich in the means for obtaining all the comforts and pleasures of life that, having come to the end of their inevitably limited capacity for pleasure and sensation, they are driven by vanity and ostentation to involve others in their power and their means for getting many pleasures. So the rich man's opulent and haughty liberality differs from a genuinely compassionate and discriminating charity only in its motives and in the carelessness with which the former distributes his gifts and throws his money around.

My aim in this description was to convey to you what luxury is, and show more or less what men mean by the word.

Our laws proscribe the use of leading questions in a trial, that is questioning which, according to the learned, asks about the specifics, when it should ask about the general features of the circumstances of a crime: questioning, in other words, which, being closely connected to the crime, leads the accused to give an immediate reply. According to theorists of the criminal law, questioning should, so to speak, spiral in on the facts and should never approach them directly. The grounds for this procedure are either so as not to lead an accused to implicate himself or perhaps because it seems to be unnatural that a suspect should accuse himself point blank.

Whichever of these two explanations is correct, there is a remarkable inconsistency in the laws between this convention and their sanctioning of torture; for what sort of interrogation could be more leading than pain? Examples of the first arise with torture, because the pain will lead the sturdy man to keep an obstinate silence and so exchange a heavier pain for a lighter; and it will lead the weak man to confess in order to free himself from the present pain which is so much more effective at that moment than future pain. The same goes for examples of the second kind, because if a specific question makes the guilty man confess against the rights of nature, agony will make him do so all the more easily.

Secret denunciations are an obvious abuse, but a time-hallowed one rendered necessary in many nations by the weakness of the constitution. Such a custom makes men dishonest and furtive. Anyone who suspects he sees an informer in his fellow man sees him as an enemy. Men then become accustomed to masking their feelings and hiding them from others, finally getting to the point where they hide them from themselves. Unhappy the men who reach this stage: without clear and fixed principles to guide them, they drift lost and uncertain on the wide sea of opinion, constantly struggling to save themselves from the monsters which threaten them; they live each moment embittered by the uncertainty of the future. Deprived of the lasting pleasures of peace and security, only a few brief moments of pleasure, haphazardly wolfed down in the course of their miserable lives, offer any consolation for their having lived at all. Shall we make of such men the valiant soldiers to defend the nation or the throne? And shall we find among them the upright magistrates who, with free and patriotic eloquence, will support and swell the sovereign's true interests, who will bring to the throne along with the taxes the love and thanksgiving of all classes of men, and who, on the sovereign's behalf, will bestow on the mansion and the hovel alike the peace, security and aspiration to improve one's lot through hard work which is the useful leaven and very life of the state?

Beccaria's classic study On Crimes and Punishments belongs to the category of works which are much cited and little read. In Beccaria's case the reasons for this relative neglect are twofold. First, until recently even those who have attempted to read him, either in the original or in translation, have had to rely on a corrupt text. As is explained in the Note on the texts, the present edition provides the first English version of the book as it was last published and revised by Beccaria. Second, the context provided by Beccaria's other writings and those of his circle is rarely known, so that the background assumptions on which his argument rested have either appeared obscure or simply been misconstrued. As a result, Beccaria has come to be pigeon-holed as one of the founding fathers of a putative tradition of classic penal reformers, and the distinctiveness of his contribution has been recognised only rarely. His argument, however, was more complex than a number of commentators have appreciated, anticipating in an original way some of the solutions and difficulties of contemporary philosophers of punishment.

Punishment forms part of a wider system of social organisation and is sustained by a broad range of social practices, attitudes and institutions. Beccaria's argument for penal reform reflected a whole new discourse about the nature of society and the need for social change more generally, and has to be read as part of this larger movement.

The swifter and closer to the crime a punishment is, the juster and more useful it will be. I say juster, because it spares the criminal the useless and fierce torments of uncertainty which grow in proportion to the liveliness of one's imagination and one's sense of one's own impotence. Juster because, loss of freedom being a punishment, a man should suffer it no longer than necessary before being sentenced. Remand in custody, therefore, is the simple safe-keeping of a citizen until he may be judged guilty, and since this custody is intrinsically of the nature of a punishment, it should last the minimum possible time and should be as lacking in severity as can be arranged. The minimum time should be calculated taking into account both the length of time needed for the trial and the right of those who have been held the longest to be tried first. The stringency of the detention ought not to be greater than what is necessary to prevent escape or to save evidence from being covered up. The trial itself ought to be brought to a conclusion in the shortest possible time. What crueller contrast could there be than that between the procrastination of the judge and the anguish of the accused? On the one hand, the callous magistrate thinking of his comforts and pleasures, on the other, the prisoner languishing in tears and dejection.

Laws are the terms under which independent and isolated men come together in society. Wearied by living in an unending state of war and by a freedom rendered useless by the uncertainty of retaining it, they sacrifice a part of that freedom in order to enjoy what remains in security and calm. The sum of these portions of freedom sacrificed to the good of all makes up the sovereignty of the nation, and the sovereign is the legitimate repository and administrator of these freedoms. But it was insufficient to create this repository; it was also necessary to protect it from the private usurpations of each individual, who is always seeking to extract from the repository not only his own due but also the portions which are owing to others. What were wanted were sufficiently tangible motives to prevent the despotic spirit of every man from resubmerging society's laws into the ancient chaos. These tangible motives are the punishments enacted against law-breakers. I say tangible motives because experience shows that the common run of men do not accept stable principles of conduct. Nor will they depart from the universal principle of anarchy which we see in the physical as well as in the moral realm, unless they are given motives which impress themselves directly on the senses and which, by dint of repetition, are constantly present in the mind as a counter-balance to the strong impressions of those self-interested passions which are ranged against the universal good.

For a nation to be barbarous, if we understand the term in a precise, philosophical sense, is simply for it to be ignorant of the things that are useful to it and of how to attain them by the readiest means and those most conducive to the happiness of each individual. For a nation to be civilised is for it to be acquainted with these things. The ruler and governor is required to know what is advantageous to his people and how to secure it for them, and to have a desire so to do. The people are required simply not to obstruct by their opinions or habits the true benefits they are offered nor the true means employed to render them happy.

A nation ought not to be called barbarous so long as knowledge and opinion keep pace with each individual's needs and greatest expectations of happiness. But it can be more or less savage, a term which expresses the greater or lesser distance from the highest state of unison achievable among men, and from the greatest possible happiness divided among the greatest number. I keep stopping to provide definitions, but this is the only way we can hope to turn a wayward, unstable science into a more precise and reliable one, and to convert what has been a pretext for the unscrupulous and a formula for blood and misery into a science which is the friend of the people and the guardian of humankind.

It is a matter worth pondering in every good legal code just how the credibility of witnesses and proofs of guilt are to be weighed. Every reasonable man can be a witness, anyone, that is, whose ideas are to some degree consistent and whose sentiments are concurrent with those of other men. {{The true measure of his credibility is nothing but his interest in telling or not telling the truth, from which it follows that it is silly to exclude women on the grounds of their weakness, puerile to treat condemned men, because they are dead in law, as if they are dead in fact, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous when they have no interest in lying.}} Therefore, credibility should diminish in proportion to the affection, hate or other close relations which obtain between the witness and the accused. More than one witness is needed, because, so long as one party affirms and the other denies, nothing is certain and the right which every man has to be believed innocent preponderates. A witness's credibility noticeably diminishes as the enormity of the crime or the unlikeliness of its circumstances increase, such as in cases of witchcraft and gratuitous cruelty. It is more likely that several men should lie in a case of witchcraft, because it is more probable that illusion, ignorance or virulent hatred should act on several men than that even one man should exercise a power which God has either not given to or has taken back from every created being.

For the most part, men leave the care of the most important regulations either to common sense or to the discretion of individuals whose interests are opposed to those most foresighted laws which distribute benefits to all and resist the pressures to concentrate those benefits in the hands of a few, raising those few to the heights of power and happiness, and sinking everyone else in feebleness and poverty. It is, therefore, only after they have experienced thousands of miscarriages in matters essential to life and liberty, and have grown weary of suffering the most extreme ills, that men set themselves to right the evils that beset them and to grasp the most palpable truths which, by virtue of their simplicity, escape the minds of the common run of men who are not used to analysing things, but instead passively take on a whole set of second-hand impressions of them derived more from tradition than from enquiry.

If we open our history books we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity. They have not been dictated by a cool observer of human nature, who has brought the actions of many men under a single gaze and has evaluated them from the point of view of whether or not they conduce to the greatest happiness shared among the greater number.

Although the laws do not punish intentions, surely an action which shows a clear intent to commit a crime deserves to be punished, albeit less harshly than the actual execution of the crime would be. The necessity of preventing an attempt at crime justifies a punishment; but since the attempt and the carrying out of the crime may be separated by an interval, the heavier penalties for an accomplished crime might lead to a change of heart. The same may be said, although on different grounds, of a case in which there are accomplices in a crime, not all of whom are its main agents. When several men join together in a risky venture, the greater the risk, the more they try to share it equally among all of them. It will therefore be hard to find an individual prepared to be the main agent and to run a greater risk than his accomplices. The sole exception would be when the main agent is promised a special recompense. Since he would have been compensated for the greater risk he runs, in this case the penalty should be the same for all of them. Such considerations might seem too metaphysical to someone who does not recognise that it is of the greatest utility to have laws which elicit the fewest possible grounds for agreement among the participants in a crime.

Personal injuries which damage honour, that is, that proper esteem that a citizen can rightly expect from others, ought to be punished with public disgrace. This disgrace is a sign of public disapproval, which deprives the malefactor of public goodwill, of the nation's confidence, and of that sense almost of brotherhood which society inspires. The law does not stretch to such matters. It is therefore necessary that the disgrace inflicted by the law be the same as that which derives from the nature of things, the same as is dictated by universal morality or the particular morality which arises from particular systems, which are the lawgivers to common opinion in any given nation. If the one differs from the other, then either the laws lose public confidence or ideas of morality and rectitude disappear in spite of speechifyings, which can never overcome the power of examples.

Whoever describes actions which are in themselves matters of indifference as worthy of public disgrace, reduces the opprobrium attaching to actions which are truly disgraceful. The penalties of public disgrace ought not to fall too often nor on too many individuals at a time: in the first case, because when concrete effects are seen too frequently in matters of opinion they weaken the force of opinion itself; and in the second, because to disgrace many people is in effect to disgrace no-one.

There is a noteworthy contradiction between, on the one hand, the civil laws which are the jealous guardians of, above all, the citizen's person and goods, and, on the other, the laws of what is called ‘honour’, in which pride of place is given to opinion. Long and ingenious disquisitions have been devoted to the term ‘honour’, without any fixed and stable idea being associated with it. What a sorry state for the human mind to be in, that the most remote and trivial ideas about the revolution of the heavens should be better known than the moral notions which are near to hand and of the greatest importance, forever varying as they are buffeted by the winds of human passions and as they are accepted and disseminated by an easily led ignorance. This apparent paradox vanishes if we consider how objects which are too close to our eyes become blurred. In just this way, the very proximity of our moral ideas makes it easy for the many simple ideas which comprise them to become muddled and for the distinctions necessary to the rigorous investigation of the phenomena of human sensibility to get confused. And the impartial investigator of human affairs will cease to wonder altogether, and may begin to suspect that there may not be any need for such a complex moral apparatus and so many restraints to make men happy and secure.

Suicide is a crime which seems not to allow of being punished strictly speaking, since such a thing can only be visited either on the innocent or on a cold and insensible corpse. In the latter case, punishment would make no more impression on the living than whipping a statue. In the former case, it is unjust and tyrannical because man's political freedom presupposes that punishment be directed only at the actual culprit of a crime. Men love life too much and everything around them confirms them in this love. The enticing image of pleasure and hope, that sweetest snare of mortals, for which they will gulp down great draughts of evil if it is mixed with a few drops of delight, is too alluring for there to be any need to fear that the necessary impossibility of punishing such a crime will have any influence on men. He who fears pain obeys the law; but death extinguishes all the bodily sources of pain. What motive, then, can stay the desperate man's hand from suicide?

One who kills himself does less harm to society than one who leaves its borders forever; for the former leaves all his belongings, whilst the latter takes with him some part of what he owns. Indeed, if the strength of a nation consists in the number of its citizens, one who leaves a society to join a neighbouring nation does twice the harm of one who simply removes himself by death.

As punishments become milder, clemency and pardons become less necessary. Happy the nation in which they are harmful! Clemency, then, a virtue which has often complemented all the duties which attach to the sovereign's throne, should be redundant in a perfect administration where punishments are mild and the methods of judgement are regular and expeditious. This truth will seem hard to one who lives amid the chaos of a criminal system in which amnesties and pardons are called for in proportion to the absurdity of the laws and the awful severity of the sentences. Clemency is the most beautiful prerogative of the throne, it is the most desirable endowment of sovereignty and it is the tacit condemnation which the benevolent dispensers of the public happiness make of a code of laws which, for all its imperfections, has on its side the prejudice of ages, the voluminous and impressive tomes of innumerable commentators, the staid paraphernalia of endless procedural formalities, and the support of the most fawning and least feared semi-literates. But one ought to bear in mind that clemency is a virtue of the lawgiver and not of the laws' executor, that it ought to shine in the legal code and not in particular judgements. To show men that crimes can be pardoned, and that punishment is not their inevitable consequence, encourages the illusion of impunity and induces the belief that, since there are pardons, those sentences which are not pardoned are violent acts of force rather than the products of justice.

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the principal goal of all good legislation, which is the art of guiding men to their greatest happiness, or the least unhappiness possible, taking into account all the blessings and evils of life. But the means hitherto employed have been mistaken or opposed to the proposed goal. The chaos of men's activities cannot be reduced to a geometric order devoid of irregularity and confusion. Just as the constant and very simple laws of nature do not prevent the planets being disturbed in their orbits, so human laws cannot prevent disturbances and disorders among the infinite and very opposite motive forces of pleasure and pain. Yet this is the fantasy of limited men when they have power in their hands. To forbid a large number of trivial acts is not to prevent the crimes they may occasion. It is to create new crimes, wilfully to redefine virtue and vice, which we are exhorted to regard as eternal and immutable. What a state would we be reduced to if we were forbidden everything which might tempt us to crime? It would be necessary to deprive a man of the use of his senses. For every motive which urges a man to commit a real crime, there are a thousand which urge him to perform those trivial actions which bad laws call crimes.

To someone who does not take into account the fact that reason has almost never been the lawgiver to nations, it will seem strange, in view of these principles, that crimes which are the most serious or the most fantastical and strange, that is, which are the least likely to occur, come to be proved by guesses or by the weakest and least clearcut evidence. It is as if the laws and the judge had an interest not in the truth, but in getting a guilty verdict; as if the conviction of an innocent man were not a greater danger the more the likelihood of innocence outstrips the likelihood of guilt. Most men lack the energy that is as necessary for great crimes as it is for great virtue, from which it seems that the two go together in those countries which sustain themselves more by the activity of government and a passion for the public good, than by their size or the constant high quality of their laws. In the latter sort of country, weakened passions seem better suited to maintaining than to improving the form of government. And from this we draw the important conclusion that great crimes do not always show that a country is in decline.

There are some crimes which are at once common in society and difficult to prove. And in these cases, the difficulty of producing evidence indicates the probability of innocence.

I conclude with a final reflection that the severity of punishments ought to be relative to the state of the nation itself. Stronger and more easily felt impressions have to be made on a people only just out of the savage state. A lightning strike is needed to stop a fierce lion who is provoked by a gunshot. But as souls become softened by society, sensitivity grows. And as it does so, the severity of punishments ought to diminish, if the relation between the object and the sensation is to remain constant.

From all I have written it is possible to draw a very useful general axiom, though it little conforms to custom – the most usual legislator of nations. It is: In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law.