ABSTRACT
Cesare Beccaria considered that criminals owe a ‘debt’ to society and proposed that punishments should be fixed strictly in proportion to the seriousness of the crime. The use of imprisonment should be greatly extended, the conditions of prisons improved with better physical care provided and inmates should be segregated on the basis of gender, age and degree of criminality. Beccaria’s theory of criminal behaviour is based on the concepts of free will and hedonism where he proposes that all human behaviour is essentially purposive and based on the pleasure–pain principle. Jeremy Bentham spent a considerable amount of time and energy designing a prison, an institution to reflect and operationalize his ideas on criminal justice. The philosophy of the Classical theorists was reflected in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 and the French Penal Code of 1791, the body of criminal law introduced in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
