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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HISTORICAL SKETCH REFORMS IN THE CRIMINAL LAW. Whenever our national pride rises high on comparing the present social condition of England with that of other countries, it may and should be checked by reflections on the amount of vice and misery which was annually accruing amongst us from bad laws and faulty institutions within less than a century. Recollect, for instance, the state of our prisons before Howard called attention to them, or the demoralizing barbarity of our criminal laws before Romilly undertook the heroic task of mitigating them. We propose to recapitulate the principal steps taken by him and those who immediately followed in his train for this most laudable end, in the hope that we may thereby reflect valuable light on sundry contemplated improvements in our penal system. At the commencement of the nineteenth century, although Beccaria's famous treatise had made numerous converts (a) (a) It seems he was not one of them. I have just heard, writes Lord Byron from Milan, in 1816, an anecdote of Beccaria, who published such admirable things on the punishment of death. As soon as his book was out, his servant (having read it, I presume) stole his watch; and his master, while correcting the press of a second edition, did all he could to have him hanged by way of advertisement. amongst continental jurists, his theory of punishments was little known on this side of the channel, whilst a superficial book, written in a contrary sense, exercised a widespread and most mischievous influence for a period. In Madan's Thoughts on Executive Justice, it was argued that every penal code, to be efficacious, should be rigidly enforced; and he proposed to act upon this maxim without adopting the precaution of first adjusting the scale of punishment to the various...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217228275 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217228275 |
| Weight | 0.23 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.15 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 62 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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