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Chapter One provides a brief overview of the early modern Ottoman legal system and its transformation during the long nineteenth century with special emphasis on the creation of a comprehensive criminal justice system including policing and surveillance, new courts, penal codes, and prisons. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the relationship between prisons and the transformation of Ottoman criminal justice, especially the links between the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code and incarceration. This transformation was fully rooted in past legal practices while also appropriating and adapting new legal policies from abroad. This process of transformation does not represent an Ottoman progressive march towards Westernisation and secularisation, but one that consciously reinterpreted its Islamic legal system and transformed it through the application of modern methods of governance, such as legal codification, administrative centralisation, the rationalisation and standardisation of legal practice, and the utilisation of incarceration as the primary form of punishment for criminal behaviour.

This chapter discusses the end of public punishment in England during the civilizing process. The history of punishment is usually portrayed as a simple record of progress away from the horrors of Newgate, the pillory, the convict ship, and above all the public execution. It suggests that England experienced the most remarkable shifts in the punishment of criminals during the mid-seventeenth century. This trend may be attributed to the demographic growth, which had been one of the basic facts of English social life for a century before the 1630s.

In the context of a late twentieth‐century politics of race and gender—a politics often suspicious of the liberal ideal of equal dignity—what is the value of the realist novel? What kinds of moral and political thinking are bound up in the very form of this distinctively modern literary genre, and what claim should they have upon us today? This chapter shows that while Coetzee's Foe reflects on the origins of the form of the novel by way of its allusions to Defoe, its exploration of these more complex questions is indebted to Dostoevsky's seminal exploration of novelistic form in Crime and Punishment.

This chapter presents select excerpts from Cesare Beccaria Bonesana's On Crimes and Punishments. It examines whether the death penalty really is useful and just in a government that is well administered. The chapter argues that the death penalty is for most people a spectacle, and for some an object of compassion blended with disdain. These are the two sentiments that take hold of the minds of spectators, rather than the salutary terror that the law claims to inspire. The chapter then takes a look at Beccaria, Gallarati Scotti and Risi's opinion Against the Death Penalty. It discusses the drafting of the new penal code — The Criminal Law Committee. Ultimately, it infers that the death penalty is inappropriate because it is irreversible; we bear in mind the inevitable imperfection of human judgements. Even if the death were a just penalty, even if it were the most efficacious of all punishments, in order for it to be justly applied to a particular criminal, it would be necessary that he be proven to be guilty in such a way that the possibility of the contrary is excluded.

This chapter outlines the foundations of an argument that would culminate in the displacement of the death penalty from the top rung of the ladder of punishments. It focuses solely on the longest chapter, Chapter 28, in Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments to discuss the author's structure of punishments. As such, it represented all that was wrong with the existing criminal law. The chapter argues that the argument against the death penalty, which Beccaria regarded as decisive, is derived from his version of Social Contract theory. The abuses of the existing system of criminal justice, which are roundly attacked from the very beginning, are the creation of human convention, that is to say, legislation supplemented by jurisprudential opinion, which have strayed from the 'enactments' of the Social Contract. It then follows with a statement of the fundamental principle which the laws representing the contracts made among men should seek to uphold, namely, 'the greatest happiness shared among the greater number'. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the influence of Helvétius on Pietro Verri and Beccaria in elevating an early version of utilitarianism to the status of an established philosophical doctrine.

This chapter shows how the mutiny of 1857 produced a version of Indian criminality that further problematized the myth of the British rule of law. This may seem odd because the event is traditionally seen as a fertile source in the construction of a version of ‘criminal India’ where all the natives were represented as variations of the stereotypical thugs and rebels. However, once placed within the context of the shifts in ideas about crime and punishment emerging in Britain, the colonial ‘just retribution’ paradoxically threw up disturbing questions about the claims to a rule of law.

This chapter turns to the birth of the homo sexualis, and of the discourse of sexuality, as the second pillar of liberalism investigated in the book. Its main (seemingly paradoxical) thesis is that the question of punishment as it arises in the liberal context also accounts for the emergence of a different discourse, that of forensic psychiatry and psychopathology which, very quickly, and as early as the 1840s, established itself as a science of sexuality. Faced with a number of criminal cases that resisted its rationality of crime and punishment, based on the notions of interest, utility, motive and efficiency, liberal governmentality found it necessary to supplement the rationality in question with another, based on the distinction between normal and abnormal (or pathological) individuals and instincts. Desire was thus inserted into a new rationality (that of psychopathology and the scientia sexualis), and a new family of concepts (that of natural, normal instincts or drives, and deviations or perversions).

Conan Doyle is best known for his crime stories. This chapter shows that the police, judiciary, and penal systems were all subject to debate and reform in his lifetime. Criticism usually sees detective fiction as complicit with the disciplinary regimes of its time. This chapter however shows the Holmes stories to be remarkably uninterested in, and uninformative about, the policing and judicial process, focusing instead on the adventure of uncovering secrets and creating knowledge. But in his non-fictional work, and especially in his campaigns for the victims of official injustice like Edalji and Slater, Conan Doyle emerges later in his career as an alienated observer and radical critic of his society's institutions of law and order, and the interests they serve.

This chapter examines fictional portrayals of murder as a means of understanding how Russian audiences adjusted to the postreform society. A murder with no mystery, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) established what would become identifiable as the generic conventions of crime fiction in Russia. Crime fiction takes up the ideological challenge of why individuals transgress the boundaries established by the society of which they are members. The emphasis on the why rather than the who, the greater interest in the motive rather than in an identity that must be uncovered, would characterize Russia's fictional forays beyond the law. By the turn of the twentieth century, because of the effects of the reforms and the government's push toward industrialization, crime fiction began changing perceptively, moving away from moral melodramas toward shorter stories that emphasized violence.

This chapter presents an authoritative overview of the economics of crime control, with particular emphasis on Gary Becker's arguments as set forth in his seminal paper, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach. It begins with a description of Becker's principal conclusions and then explores some of the developments in the literature since the publication of his paper. Topics range from the economic model of criminal behavior to the optimal size of criminal sanctions the state should impose, the optimal type of sanctions it should imposed, and the economics of fines and incarceration. The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling relevant issues such as deterrence and the law, economics, and neuroethical realism of crime control.

This introductory chapter explores the two large collections of documents acquired from the archives of the Pelli-Fabbroni family in 1968–1969: the draft of an unfinished dissertation Against the Death Penalty and its first edition, produced by Philippe Audegean, with a substantial introduction to the text and its contents, in Italian and in French. It discusses Giuseppe Bencivenni Pelli's (1729–1808) career within the Austrian Habsburg administration in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, his most prominent post, and the one that gave him the greatest satisfaction: the director of the Uffizi Gallery. This chapter discusses Pelli's first systematic attack on the death penalty in history. It also highlights the enormous diary that he compiled, Efemeridi, over almost half a century, from 1759. The chapter then takes a look at another member of the minor nobility, but of Milan, who worked for the Austrian administration in Lombardy, Cesare Beccaria Bonesana (1738–94). It investigates Bonesana's publication of On Crimes and Punishments in July 1764. Before the discovery of Pelli's work, it was assumed that Beccaria's work contained the first serious attack on the death penalty. Pelli targeted the death penalty exclusively, whereas Beccaria's work was an attack on the whole system of criminal law operating in his time.

This chapter looks at Humphry Tristram Potter's New Dictionary of all the Cant and Flash Languages (1795), which has a dishonest bibliography and a dubious biography. More than 80 per cent of the dictionary's word-list is derived from earlier slang dictionaries, some up to fifty years old. From these, Potter selected terms labelled as ‘cant’ and those dealing with crime and punishment. Terms listed in both The New Canting Dictionary and the second edition of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue also had a good chance of selection. Potter deleted citations, authorities, and etymologies found in his sources, resulting in a more concise dictionary. However, some of his efficiencies led to ambiguities that left a characteristic signature on all later dictionaries derived from his. Although some of his additions appear to be fabricated from the raw material found in his sources, Potter does have some new entries that seem to represent contemporary cant, or at least slang.

This chapter explores two of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's remarkable characters — Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment and the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov — exhibit a Machiavellian “understanding” of things. It notes that NiccolÒ Machiavelli can be regarded as critical to the development of modernity in political (and hence in constitutional) principles. It observes that each character can help us as well to see better not only the tormented soul of the author but also “the soul” of that modernity which has spawned the characters relied upon by the author. It opines that the New World, dramatized by the Protestant Reformation, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, may be said to be grounded in fundamental reconsiderations of the proper relationship between the individual and the community.

Once the object of government is identified as population, the question becomes one of knowing whether, beneath all the natural variables that define a population, there is something like an invariant, or a “mainspring of action” shared by the population as a whole. That, Foucault claims, is precisely desire. In the philosophical anthropology and moral psychology of the eighteenth century, desire is integrated as a key mechanism for the government of individuals, but only at the cost of being associated with new concepts, corresponding to a new conception of human nature, namely, self-interest and utility. The natural conclusion to draw from those observations is that, since human beings are naturally governed by interest, it would be unwise, if not altogether foolish (or simply ineffective) to govern them any differently than according to their own interest and relative selfishness, especially regarding private property and the acquisition of riches. Thus, a new conception and technology of government were born, which continue to operate today. Crucial, in that respect, is the role of the market, now seen as the place where the maximization and realization of interest and utility takes place, and the vehicle for the realization of one's desires.

Jones chose to train as a barrister as a career in which intellectual merit might rival aristocratic privilege, facilitating independence. This chapter illustrates work and leisure as he rode the Oxford and Carmarthen circuits Lessons learned in the principality prepared him for his role as an imperial administrator. In Carmarthen, Haverfordwest and Cardigan he championed the rights of a peasantry oppressed by the arbitrary power exercised by Anglicized landlords, rack-renting squirearchy, and English-speaking monoglot magistrates and judges His letters provide a vivid picture of crime, punishment, and widely divergent social conditions within the principality. In his leisure hours ‘clubbable’ Jones initiated the society of the ‘Druids of the Tivy’ for the off-duty barristers whose fêtes champêtre, by the picturesque Teifi, rang to the extempore Romantic lyrics of pencerdd (chief Bard) Jones. Details of the causes argued by the celebrity barrister are interspersed with the lyrics composed by the ‘druidical ‘poet.

This chapter first looks at the novel as the epic, noting differences between the two concepts such as: the novel fundamentally “shows” a story rather than “tells” it. Unlike the literature of the past, the novel also is not dependent upon a well-known story such as those found in myth, legend, or the Bible. Although allusions to them surface, the main purpose and reality of the novel is what the five senses disclose about reality. This chapter looks at two novels that illustrate various aspects about the novel, and how these particular novels explore the concepts behind John Locke's theory of knowledge. It studies Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

This chapter discusses Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment (2007) and Petition (2009) as penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China. Together, they render visible those who are un(der)represented, critique the deception of mass media images, and show the various complex ways in which power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus the filmmaker, his camera, and the spectators are implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon the representatives of state power and upon the disenfranchised.