Deterrence Theory

Thomas Hobbes

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan, an influential book on human nature and its relationship to human organization and government. Like many others, Hobbes assumed that the human being is by nature competitive, distrustful, and engaged in an endless search for his or her own personal glory. This account of the human individual leads to the famous Hobbesian question: How can social order possibly exist? In addition, how, when humans gather together, can war or conflict be avoided? Finally, how can people avoid lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?” Somehow, though, citizens in some modern, developed countries do avoid this condition; they do so by establishing a social contract. This contract serves to help constrain those potentially disastrous natural characteristics for the good of all but also for individual good. People sacrifice some of the free reign that they might allow their individual natures in the interest of saving themselves; they do so by voluntarily joining in the social contract. Two important aspects of this social contract are the rules with which each person must abide and the punishments for violating those rules. In Hobbes's view, deterrence is simply the reason why one human being or group of human beings in a social contract punishes another, to save and keep the social contract viable and healthy.

Cesare Beccaria

Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments, first published in 1764, helped set in motion a change toward more humane punishment practices. This change was a slow evolution that finally took effect in most civilized societies by roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, extreme and brutal physical punishments—even for the most minor of crimes—were the [Page 513]standard. Beccaria elaborated two very important aspects of punishment, proportionate punishment and the intended objects of punishment. “The object … of punishment is simply to prevent the criminal from injuring anew his fellow-citizens, and to deter others from committing similar injuries; and those punishments and that method of inflicting them should be preferred which, duly proportioned to the offence, will produce a more efficacious and lasting impression on the minds of men and inflict the least torture on the body of the criminal” (Beccaria 1880: 165–166).

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