Postscript: From Forced Labour to Penal Servitude

This chapter discusses the impact of Cesare Beccaria's work on philosophers, jurists, politicians and church leaders in Italy and abroad. The debates and controversies that it provoked concerned far more than the death penalty, for he had surveyed the whole system of criminal justice with a fiercely critical eye. It reviews Beccaria's surrogate penalty of hard labour, which has received rather less attention than his views on the death penalty and other aspects of criminal justice. The chapter also explores the process by which the favoured surrogate penalty of the two Italian reformers (for Giuseppe Pelli as well as Beccaria advocated forced labour) evolved into the punishment that is routinely characterised as 'penal servitude' by contemporary legal historians and criminologists. Ultimately, the chapter investigates preliminary observations of Beccaria's surrogate penalty as slavery or servitude, and both Pelli and Beccaria's reference to their preferred alternative punishment as forced labour, not as imprisonment at hard labour.