ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most traditional societal approach to crime prevention is punishment. While the biblical injunction prescribing ‘an eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ (Leviticus, Chapter 24) has long been championed as an effective preventative approach, its true crime deterrent value also has been argued for centuries. For instance, Waller (2000) reports that in the four decades between 1680 and 1720 the number of crimes that warranted the death penalty in England soared from approximately eighty to more than 350. ‘Indeed, there are so many that no one can be absolutely sure what you can or cannot be hanged for’ (page 309). However,
These observations were obviously lost on eighteenth century crime theorists of the classical school, such as utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1962), who argued that the deterrent effect of the fear of punishment was the best crime prevention tool (Hart, 1968). Basic tenets of this conception were that offenders act rationally and out of free will and that punishment was intended to punish the offence, rather than the offender.7 Moral and legal principles guided this early branch of criminology in its attempt to protect the rights of the accused and standardise punishments.
