Modern penology dates from the publication of Beccaria's pamphlet on 'Crimes and Punishments" in 1764. This repre sented a school of doctrine, born of the new humanitarian impulse of the 18th century with which Rousseau, Voltaire and Montes quieu in France and Bentham in England were associated. This, which came afterwards to be known as the classical school, assumed every criminal act to be a deliberate choice determined by a calculation of the prospective pleasures and pains of the act contemplated. All that was needed to overcome the criminal pur pose was to provide for each and every crime a penalty adequate to overbalance its assumed advantages. Excessive penalties, such as death, were unnecessary and therefore unjust. This was fol lowed, a generation later, by the neo-classical school of the revolu tionary period in France, which modified Beccaria's rigorous doctrine by insisting on the recognition of varying degrees of moral, and therefore of legal responsibility, as in the case of chil dren and the insane, as well as of mitigating circumstances in general. The doctrine of the "individualization of punishment," that is to say of the punishment of the individual rather than of the crime committed by him, which is of commanding importance in present day penology, is only a development of this funda mental principle of the neo-classical school.
This normal historical development of penology was interrupted during the last quarter of the last century by the widespread ac ceptance of the theory of crime and its treatment promulgated by the Italian, Lombroso, and his disciples. This, at first known as
the Italian, later, as the continental, school of criminology, now claims the title of the positive school, so-called because it pursues the positive methods of modern science. Its fundamental doctrine is that the criminal is doomed by his inherited traits to a criminal career and is therefore a wholly irresponsible actor. Society must, of course, protect itself against him, but to punish him as if he were a free moral agent is as irrational as it is unethical.
While the enthusiasm for the doctrines of the positive school has waned and the alleged facts on which they were based have been largely discredited, it has, nevertheless, left a valuable legacy of influence. To it must be given much of the credit for the pres ent active tendency to make the mental study of the criminal an essential part of his diagnosis, a fact which has, in the last quarter century, given the psychologist and, particularly, the psychiatrist a leading place in the development of modern penological theory. From studies such as these the present school of criminologists have discovered that there is no single formula that accounts for all violators of the penal code, while the policy of the individual ization of punishment has taken on the form of individualization of treatment. Indeed, the note of the day is research—research into the factors, whether individual or social, which determine criminal activities and research into the resources of the commu nity for making such disposition of the offender as will effectually protect the former without destroying the latter.