Cesare Beccaria

And so... to understand that the norms that generate the thing we call prison are very man-made by groups of people over several hundred years debating when, why, how to punish.

And so the reverse engineering of the whipping case gets me to this book, which is that First, it took great insight by some grand men of the Enlightenment named Jeremy Bentham and Cesar Beccaria to say, that governments had to explain and justify their punishments as contrasted to just punishing any way they wanted.

So step one was the idea of a need for justification.

And Bentham famously, a utilitarian said, you need to be effective and focus on deterrence.

Beccaria as well, Beccaria also was a humanitarian.

So he said, consult the human heart.

And he campaigned energetically against the death penalty, which was then very common for all sorts of minor crimes.