Modern penology dates from the publication of Cesare Beccaria’s pamphlet on Crimes and Punishments in 1764. This represented a school of doctrine, born of the new humanitarian impulse of the 18th century, with which Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu in France and Jeremy Bentham in England were associated. The classical school was followed, a generation later, by the neoclassical school of the revolutionary period in France, which modified Beccaria’s rigorous doctrine by insisting on the recognition of varying degrees of moral, and therefore of legal, responsibility, as in the case of children and the insane, as well as of mitigating circumstances in general.

This, which came afterwards to be known as the classical school, assumed every criminal act to be a deliberate choice determined by a calculation of the prospective pleasures and pains of the act contemplated. All that was needed to overcome the criminal purpose was to provide for every crime a penalty adequate to overbalance its assumed advantages. Excessive penalties, such as death, were unnecessary and therefore unjust. The doctrine of the “individualization of punishment”—that is to say, of the punishment of the individual rather than of the crime committed by him, which is of commanding importance in present-day penology, is only a development of this fundamental principle of the neoclassical school.