The system of law in the European tradition, its mechanisms of enforcement and the forms of punishment used prior to the expanse of thought in ideas of crime in the late 18th and early 19th century, were primitive and inconsistent, mainly due to the domination of semi religious, demonological explanations.
[1] Judges were not professionally trained[citation needed] so many of their decisions were unsatisfactory being the product of incompetence, capriciousness, corruption, and political manipulation.
A need for legal rationality and fairness was identified and found an audience among the emerging middle-classes whose economic interests lay in providing better systems for supporting national and international trade.
He concluded that monarchs had asserted the right to rule and enforced it either through an exercise in raw power or through a form of contract, e.g. the feudal system had depended on the grants of estates inland as a return for services provided to the sovereign.
This is a shift from authoritarianism to an early model of European and North American democracy where police powers and the system of punishment are means to a more just end.
Rich and powerful men who have never deigned to visit the squalid huts of the poor, who have never had to share a crust of mouldy bread amid the innocent cries of hungry children and the tears of a wife.
As King over a few, I will correct the mistakes of fortune and will see these tyrants grow pale and tremble in the presence of one whom with an insulting flourish of pride they used to dismiss to a lower level than their horses and dogs."
[3] In this context, the most relevant idea was known as the "felicitation principle" of utilitarianism, i.e. that whatever is done should aim to give the greatest happiness to the largest possible number of people in society.
[citation needed] For example, if rape and homicide were both punished by death, then a rapist would be more likely to kill the victim (as a witness) to reduce the risk of arrest.
In Bentham's introduction of the Panopticon in 1791, he outlined prisons as a place to not only punish criminals, but to be a reminder of the repercussions in crime, in line with the classical emphasis on prevention through deterrence.
The Neo-classical school (criminology) of the 19th century contributed modifications to pure Classical thought, led by French thinkers such as Henri Joly and René Garraud.
These revisions bring doubt to the certainty of deterrence preventing crime due to 'rationality' by taking into consideration that the idea of rationality is subjective to the experiences, opinions, and totality of a human being.
But, because it lacks sophistication, it was the operationalised in a mechanical way, assuming that there is a mathematics of deterrence, i.e. a proportional calculation undertaken first by policy makers and then by potential offenders.