For most of human history, the answer to “why do people commit crimes?” was supernatural: possession, sin, an evil nature. The idea that crime could be studied the way any other observable behavior is studied — systematically, with evidence — is only a few hundred years old, and it changed criminal punishment more than any single law ever did.
When Explaining Crime Meant Finding a Witch
Through the late medieval and early modern period — roughly the 1200s through the 1600s — unexplained misfortune and antisocial behavior were routinely blamed on witchcraft. Tens of thousands of people across Europe were accused, tried, and executed, often by burning, on evidence that would not survive contact with any modern legal standard. Ordinary crime fared little better: punishment for theft and violence tended to be public, physical, and severe — whipping, branding, mutilation — with little interest in why the person had offended in the first place.
Beccaria and the Birth of Classical Criminology
By the 1700s, Enlightenment thinkers were reconsidering the relationship between crime and punishment through the lens of reason rather than religion. The most influential was Cesare Beccaria, an Italian philosopher whose 1764 essay On Crimes and Punishments argued that people act to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that punishment should therefore be calibrated — proportionate to the offense, certain to occur, and delivered swiftly — rather than simply as severe as possible.
This became the foundation of what is still called classical criminology, built on a few core ideas:
- People have free will and choose between lawful and criminal ways to meet their needs.
- A criminal choice is often more attractive because it promises a bigger payoff for less effort.
- Fear of punishment is one of the main things that restrains that choice.
- Punishment controls behavior best when it is proportionate, reliably enforced, and applied quickly — not simply harsh.
Beccaria’s arguments directly influenced the move away from public torture-executions and toward the more proportionate, codified sentencing that modern criminal law still aims for, at least in principle.
The Scientific Turn — and Its False Start
By the 1800s, the scientific method that was transforming biology and chemistry got turned on human behavior itself. Auguste Comte, generally credited as the founder of sociology, argued that societies pass through stages of understanding — from superstition, to abstract reasoning, to what he called the “positive” stage, where claims are tested against observable, measurable evidence. This positivist idea — that human behavior, including criminal behavior, has identifiable causes that can be studied empirically — is the direct ancestor of modern criminology.
The earliest attempts to apply this scientifically, though, went badly wrong. Phrenologists in the early 1800s measured skull shapes and bumps, convinced that criminal tendencies could be read off the physical structure of the head. Later researchers measured facial features — the spacing of the eyes, the shape of the ears — looking for the same thing. None of it held up, and these theories are remembered today as a cautionary tale about mistaking measurement for evidence, not as a real finding about crime.
What Survived
What did survive from this era is the basic premise: crime is a phenomenon that can be studied with evidence rather than assumed from superstition, and punishment works better when it is proportionate and consistent rather than simply severe. Modern criminology has left phrenology far behind, but it still asks Beccaria’s underlying question — what actually deters people from committing crimes — and still looks for the answer in data rather than in a person’s skull or their soul.
See also where our legal system came from and how the criminal justice process works.
