Chapter One

Clive R. Hollin and Emma J. Palmer University of Leicester

INTRODUCTION

The history of crime tells us that the long-standing approach to crime reduction, across many cultures and civilisations, lay in the dispensation of punishment. The favoured punishments for crime took many forms, involving harsh penalties such as amputation, deportation, torture, and even death. It is arguable how effective such punitive strategies proved to be; certainly crime has never been eliminated from any society, but it might well be argued that those criminals who are executed commit very few crimes! It is only comparatively recently that changes in thinking within Western cultures came about that shifted legal systems away from immediate harsh sanctions to the notion that the punishment should fit the crime. The beginnings of classical theory, strongly influenced by Cesare Beccaria (b. 1738) and Jeremy Bentham (b. 1748), introduced to law the notion of utility. Following the principles of utility, the purpose of legal punishment is not to administer harsh punishment, but to deliver just enough punishment to deter the individual from further criminal actions and so prevent crime. Inherent in this approach, now enshrined in Western legal systems, is, first, that criminals act of their own free will in committing a crime, and second that criminals act in a rational manner when exercising free will. The principle of utility and its association with free will and rational choice does not always sit easily alongside psychological accounts of human action. Rather than free will, psycholog