PUNISHMENT

the infliction of some kind of pain or loss upon a person for a misdeedi.e., the transgression of a law or command. Punishment may take forms varying from capital punishment, flogging, and mutilation of the body to imprisonment, fines, and even deferred sentences that come into operation only if an offense is repeated within a specified time. In primitive society, punishment was left to the individuals wronged or to their families and was vindictive or retributive: in quantity and quality it would bear no special relation to the character or gravity of the offense. Gradually there arose the idea of proportionate punishment, such as is reflected in the dictum an eye for an eye. The next stage was punishment by individuals under the control of the state or community; eventually, with the growth of law, the state took over the punitive function and provided itself with the machinery of justice for the maintenance of public order. Under such a system, crimes are against the state, and the exaction of punishment by the wronged individual (e.g., by lynching) is illegal. Even at the legal stage the vindictive or retributive character of punishment remains, but gradually, and especially after the humanist movement under such thinkers as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, new theories begin to emerge. Two chief trains of thought have combined in the condemnation of primitive theory and practice. On the one hand, the retributive principle itself has been very largely superseded by the protective and the reformative; on the other, punishments involving bodily pain have become objectionable to the general sense of society. Consequently corporal and even capital punishment occupy a far less prominent position now than in earlier times. It began to be recognized also that stereotyped punishments, such as belong to penal codes, fail to take due account of the particular condition of an offense and the character and circumstances of the offender. A fixed fine, for example, operates very unequally on rich and poor. Modern theories date from the 18th century, when the humanitarian movement began to teach the dignity of the individual and to emphasize his rationality and responsibility. The result was the reduction of punishment both in quantity and in severity, the improvement of the prison system, and the first attempts to study the psychology of crime and to distinguish between classes of criminals with a view to their improvement. These latter problems are the province of criminal anthropology and criminal sociology, sciences so called because they view crime as the outcome of anthropological and social conditions. In this view, the individual who breaks the law is seen as a product of social evolution and cannot be regarded as solely responsible for his disposition to transgress. Habitual crime is thus to be treated as a disease. According to this view, punishment can be justified only insofar as it (1) protects society by removing temporarily or permanently one who has injured it, or by acting as a deterrent, or (2) aims at the moral or social regeneration of the criminal. In the latter half of the 20th century, many people objected to this view of punishment, feeling that it placed too little responsibility on the offender for his actions, that it undervalued the deterrent effect of stiff punishment, and that it ignored society's right to retribution. In response to such attitudes, many governments enacted stiffer penal codes. For example, many states in the United States adopted mandatory, fixed prison sentences for certain crimes, and capital punishment saw a resurgence in the United States.