By Comer Wadzeck
In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published his now-classic work The Three Musketeers in serialized format. Between the swashbuckling feats of D’Artagnon and his musketeer friends, there exists a pervasive fear of that infamous prison, the Bastille. The characters, battling against the nefarious Count Richelieu and his agents, comment often on the likelihood of imprisonment for political opposition, and little else. The capricious and often undefined decisions of political titans and magistrates had inexorable power. More than a century after the events of the epic romance, Enlightenment thinkers were applying their new codes of reason and ethics to ancient establishments of sovereign power. At the forefront of their minds, no doubt, was the Bastille. Its dark dungeons acted as a symbol for the obscure justice of the Old Regime, and they were searching for new, humanist conceptions of punishment. Among them was Cesare Beccaria, who published On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, followed by Jeremy Bentham’s work, referred to in this essay as Panopticon, in 1796. Though they both sought to revolutionize the European punitive system in early-modern era, they inadvertently built an intellectual foundation for the development of a prison-industrial complex. Beccaria proposed convict labor as an alternative which was refined by Bentham, creating a new form of carceral disfunction which would strip its victims of the same rights upon which Liberal Enlightenment rests.
Beccaria and the Humanist Rejection of Corporal Punishment
Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment stands as an excellent example of Enlightenment writers questioning the system of criminal law in place throughout much of Western society. At the crux of his treatise are these questions. Are premodern forms of punishment like torture and capital punishment “just and do they serve the purpose for which such laws are made? What is the best way of preventing crimes? Are the same punishments equally useful at all times?”(79) In Beccaria’s time, the law was obscure to the vast majority of the population, while torture and capital punishment were common means of maintaining the power of the state. Imprisonment, too, was harsh in nature especially in France. Legal his Historian John Hostettler described in Cesare Beccaria, the Genius of On Crime and Punishments, “lettres de cachet were widely used by powerful and religious zealots to secure the imprisonment of their perceived enemies in dark and dank dungeons like the Bastille without trial.”(108) He regarded these practices as an abuse of the law, a transgression by the state in the name of a sovereign. He believed that key failures in the laws of the previous two centuries were the obscurity of law and the inconsistency of sentencing for the efficacy of punishment.
The purpose of punishment, therefore, is none other than to prevent the criminal from doing fresh harm to fellow citizens and to deter others from doing the same.
Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment
These objections came of an analysis of punishment’s role in governance, primarily in its failure to uphold the bonds of the social contract between the sovereign and the governed. In the Beccarian sense, laws were formulated “from living society or from the sovereign who represents it as the legitimate depositary of the current sum of the will of everyone.”(Beccaria 67) This definition was critical to the humanism of his reforms because he was able to fashion a new definition for punishment. Beccaria outlined this purpose for punitive measures: “The purpose of punishment, therefore, is none other than to prevent the criminal from doing fresh harm to fellow citizens and to deter others from doing the same.”(80) How, then, did Beccaria use this working definition to curb the cruelty of corporal punishment while providing the state with a tool for enforcing social order and maintaining peace? His answer was imprisonment.
The death sentence was, for Beccaria, an ineffective means for the deterrence of crime because execution can be viewed by the condemned with more courage than one facing the loss of liberty. He averred, “this is the advantage of penal servitude, which frightens those who witness it more than those who suffer it, for the former consider the entire sum of unhappy moments, while the latter are distracted from future unhappiness by the unhappiness of the present moment.”(107) Beccaria’s aim in the administration was still centered on its utility in society as a deterrent, advocating for imprisonment not as an alleviation of suffering but as a kind of lesser evil. Imprisonment is here enacted as punishment for the benefit of the observer, marking a fundamental shortcoming in Beccaria’s supposed humanism. Beccaria believed that laws should protect the functioning of society, but he had no doubt that the guilty be punished through incarceration. “We must regard the public execution,” wrote Michel Foucault in his 1975 treatise Discipline and Punish, “as a political operation,”(53) and indeed, Beccaria’s penal servitude should be viewed in exactly the same manner.
The principles of the Enlightenment had a profound result on criminal justice reform in Europe over the course of the 18th century, but the foundations of reason and logic created a kind of double-edged sword in practice. “On the one hand, it reiterates the liberal principles of legality, the prohibition of cruel and inhuman punishment, and proportionality of punishment to crime. On the other hand, being conceptually parasitic on liberal Enlightenment thought, it sustains the notion of individual responsibility at the expense of wider social justice considerations.”(Adnan Sattar, 17) In short, the criminal was deserving of punishment for society to function effectively.
Bentham and the Panoptic Architectural System
Beccaria’s treatise was the subject of considerable conversation among his contemporaries and quickly became a widely discussed criticism of the European criminal justice system of the 18th century. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon directly applied the need for modernization to the process of incarceration itself by seeking an architectural solution. “The more constantly the persons to inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been obtained.” If the eye of authority could not observe each inmate perfectly, Bentham noted that “the next thing to be wished for is, that … he should conceive himself to be so.”(3) With this observation as a principle thesis, he described a model for a prison which would do just that.
Bentham’s panoptic model was an architectural embodiment of Enlightenment goals in prison reform. Gone were the dungeons of the Bastille, where torturers and executioners stoked the fires of revolt by creating martyrs and outcasts. Bentham’s system consisted of a circular building lined with inward-facing cells around its circumference and stone partitions between solitary prisoners. In the center was situated “the inspector’s lodge,”(4) which commanded a total view of each cell. Tubes running to each cell carried his commands to prisoners without his having ever to leave this outpost. High windows with blinds provided light for observation of the prisoners to ensure the impression of omnipresent observation. In essence, the design took imprisoned individual out of the dark of the dungeon while simultaneously creating an environment of complete solitude.
This kind of transformation of the prison had a multitude of effects. As Bentham himself noted, the panoptic model allowed that “a greater multitude than ever were yet lodged in one house might be inspected by single person. For the trouble of inspection is diminished in no less proportion than the strictness of inspection is increased.”(25) Beccaria’s proposition for diligence in the speedy execution of punishment was extended by Bentham, who argued for the strict observation and separation of prisoners as a means for keeping them docile. Again, there was the appeal to increased efficiency at the expense of its victims. Indeed, this model diminished the rights of the individual, even as the sovereign’s power over the body diminished. Beccaria wrote that “neither fanaticism or vanity survives in fetters or chains, under the cudgel and the yoke, or in an iron cage; and the desperate man finds that his woes are just beginning rather than ending.”(107) The individual’s identity was to disappear under the influence of solitude and captivity, a process accelerated by Bentham’s system. This hierarchical control extended to free men as well, as “servant and subordinates of every kind, will be under the same irresistible control … as the prisoners…” (26)[6] Thus, the Panopticon preserved a hierarchical social order not just between observer and observed but amongst the jailers themselves. As Michel Foucault warned, the Panopticon worked “to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control … in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals…” (172) Enlightenment values in the pursuit of efficient perfection eschewed moral considerations of the effects on the individual.
Conclusion
In the 18th century and proceeding into the 19th, intellectual history in relation to punishment began to shift away from the corporal and into the carceral. At the center of these reform-minded debates, however, remained the same concern of increasing the efficacy and efficiency of punitive actions by the state to enforce a nebulous general “will of the people.” Though he undoubtedly succeeded in unveiling the dangers of an opaque and secretive justice system, Beccaria still viewed incarceration and forced labor as a necessary use of punitive force. Jeremy Bentham envisioned a system that sought to improve prison conditions and eliminate the chronic problems of disease and escape, but in the process effectively erased those fundamental rights of man in surrender to absolute authority of the sovereign. Though crafted foremost in respect to humanity and modernity, the seeds were planted for a carceral framework capable of terrible cruelty, from the infamous gulags of Russia to the Reconstruction-era convict lease system in the Southern United States. The lesson in their failure, perhaps, is the reminder that the path to a better society requires constant innovation; like them, we should be forever looking to the future even as we learn from the past.
For Further Reading
Primary Sources
Beccaria, Cesare, Voltaire, Jeremy Parzen, Aaron Thomas, and Bryan Stevenson. On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings. Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. An alternate translation by James Anson Farrer is available for free through the Gutenberg Project.
Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon Or the Inspection House. Ireland: By T. Payne, 1791. Available for free through Google Books.
Secondary Sources
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Toronto, Canada: Random House, 1975.
Hostettler, John. Cesare Beccaria: The Genius of on Crimes and Punishments. Hook, United Kingdom: Waterside Press, 2011.
Sattar, Adnan. Criminal Punishment and Human Rights: Convenient Morality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central,
