The economic rationality of classical penal humanism

Abstract

In the most representative humanist projects for the reform of criminal justice developed in the eighteenth century, we find a program for a new crime policy that is doubly marked by an economic framework: the assumption that men allow themselves to be governed through the political-legislative management of their interests, and the attempt to exhaustively promote the efficiency and utility of the resources employed in the execution of punishments. My aim is to highlight that the threshold of demands for humanitarian changes and safeguards in penal systems is embedded within the modern context of the growing prominence of the economic sphere. I argue that the acceptance of reason guided by the balance of advantages, conceived in light of alleged original dispositions of action, enables a type of economic rationality that claims to set human limits on the right to punish, and implies a significant theoretical component in the modern process of economically framing conduct in the formation of self-consciousness.