Beccaria and the Betrayal of Classical Theory: What a 260-Year-Old Framework Reveals About Modern Sentencing Failures

Beccaria’s framework requires that punishment fit the specific offense. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws fix punishment to the charge rather than to the conduct, the offender’s circumstances, or the actual harm caused, eliminating the judicial discretion required to calibrate proportionality. The result is a system that produces sentences which are certain but not proportionate, a configuration Beccaria would recognize as the precise inversion of what deterrence theory requires.

Beccaria held that certainty of punishment deters more effectively than severity. Mandatory minimums achieve certainty, but without proportionality that certainty guarantees excess rather than effective deterrence. The legislatively fixed sentence no longer tracks the offense; it tracks the charge, which is a meaningfully different thing and one over which prosecutors, not judges, exercise primary control.

Senators Durbin and Lee introduced the bipartisan Smarter Sentencing Act on February 26, 2026, addressing this specific problem at the federal level.

“Outdated policies stemming from the failed War on Drugs continue to impose lengthy, one-size-fits-all sentences for many nonviolent drug offenses.” — Senators Durbin and Lee, Smarter Sentencing Act (2026)

One size fits all is precisely what Beccaria argued against. The Classical School’s entire premise is that punishment must be calibrated to the offense, to the offender, and to the social harm caused. A mandatory minimum eliminates that calibration and replaces judicial judgment with legislative rigidity. The framework survives in the abstract while the practice contradicts it at scale.

Michigan law permits upward departures from sentencing guidelines when a court articulates substantial and compelling reasons grounded in the record. The mechanism preserves the Classical School’s proportionality principle in theory: extraordinary circumstances may warrant extraordinary sentences, but the court must explain why on a factual basis the guidelines’ recommendation is insufficient.

The departure mechanism fails the proportionality standard when courts impose sentences at multiples above guidelines before disputed restitution figures are resolved, before the factual predicate required by law exists, and before the record supports the departure’s magnitude. When that happens, the sentence is no longer proportionate to the verified offense. It is proportionate to the court’s assertion of the offense. That distinction matters considerably under Beccaria’s framework: punishment must be grounded in established facts. A sentence imposed on contested figures is speculative punishment, and speculative punishment is precisely what the Classical School was designed to prevent.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s 2026 proposed amendments address a related problem at the federal level: economic crime guidelines have been criticized for years for producing sentences that bear little relationship to actual culpability, because loss table calculations translate dollar figures into sentence lengths without adequate calibration to defendant culpability, early remediation, or victim vulnerability. The proposed amendments move back toward proportionality by incorporating those factors. That is a Beccarian correction, and it is being made because the distance from the framework has become impossible to justify.

Bentham’s utilitarian calculus specifically contemplated that punishment systems with financial incentives misaligned with justice produce unjust outcomes. Punishment that enriches the punishing institution while destabilizing families and communities fails the net social benefit test regardless of whether any individual actor within the system intends that outcome. The institutional incentive structure operates independently of individual intent.

When courts generate operational revenue from fines, fees, and restitution orders, the incentive to impose proportionate punishment is systematically undermined by the financial architecture of the system itself. Inflated restitution figures impose ongoing financial burdens on defendants and their families. When those figures appear in collections compliance reporting as institutional performance metrics, the system has created a direct relationship between the severity of financial penalties and institutional operational interests. That relationship does not require deliberate design to shape outcomes. It shapes them structurally.

This dynamic connects directly to the Michigan trial court funding reform proposal analyzed separately by Clutch Justice. If replacement funding is centralized but subject to administrative metrics that still reward fine and fee enforcement, the incentive structure does not change; it relocates. The Benthamite concern about punishment systems with misaligned financial incentives applies with equal force to the reformed model if the governance architecture does not address the underlying incentive problem.

The Denver city council’s current consideration of sentencing reforms following a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that imposing harsher municipal sentences than state law allows for identical conduct is unconstitutional reflects the same proportionality principle. The court cannot impose a sentence that exceeds what the offense warrants. That is Beccaria, stated in a city council chamber in 2026, 262 years after On Crimes and Punishments was published. The framework survives because the problem it diagnosed survives.