A Zero-Tolerance Juvenile Alcohol Law: Why Legislation Won’t Work

Students of criminology see fleeting reference to Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana as an early proponent of enlightened notions pertaining to punishment and the classification of crime, but they do not know that when he was a boy, he was known as Newtoncino (little Newton) for his prowess in math and languages, nor that his only surviving daughter, Giulia, gave birth in 1785 to the great Italian novelist and poet, Alessandro Manzoni, for whom Verdi wrote his great Requiem (p. lxvii). But more to the point, one can learn from this wonderful new edition of Beccaria’s rhetorical masterpiece that he did not care to write the book, did not know much about the topic when he began, and would not have bothered had he not received ‘‘a little help from his friends,’’ specifically the Verri brothers, Pietro and Alessandro. With them and others he set up a scholarly club in Milan, and published works of a distinctly Enlightened kind, taking their cues from Scottish and French writers of the day. From Marcello Maestro’s translation of a letter from Pietro Verri, we learn the following: ‘‘And now I will satisfy you on the subject of the book On Crimes and Punishments. The book is by the Marquis Beccaria. I gave him the subject; the majority of the ideas are the result of conversation which took place everyday between Beccaria, Alessandro, Lambertenghi, and myself. In our society we pass the evening in the same room, each of us working. Alessandro is working on the Storia d’Italia. I have my political and economic works. Beccaria was bored and bored with others. Desperately, he asked me for a subject and I suggested this to him, because I knew it was an excellent one for an eloquent and very imaginative man. But he knew nothing about our criminal systems. Alessandro, who was Protector of Prisoners, promised to help him. Beccaria began to write his ideas on sheets of paper, and we encouraged him so much that he set down a great many ideas; every afternoon we took a walk and we talked of the errors in criminal law, we had discussions, questions, and then, at night, he did his writing; but it is so tiring for him to write that after an hour he cannot go on. When he had all the material collected, I wrote it down and we gave order to it, so to form a book. The difficulty was to publish such delicate matters without having trouble. I sent it to Mr. Aubert in Leghorn, who had published my Meditazioni sulla felicita. I sent the manuscript in April last year [1764] and we received the first copy in July 1764’’ (p. lviii). From this testimonial we learn that Beccaria was not a scholar so much as a talented writer with encouraging friends (‘‘it is not the logic [of the book] that is so important, but rather its ‘heart’’’ [p. l]), and that the Enlightenment came to Milan in the form of young men with great enthusiasm for modern ideas, and the wherewithal to indulge their intellectual passions. The book itself inspired Jefferson and other Founders to demolish medieval notions of justice and punishment, gave to Bentham the immortal ‘‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’’ (pp. xliv, 7), excited Voltaire as well as Catherine the Great, and was a huge rhetorical success. Its 47 chapters are actually very short observations, lucidly expressed. His influence was and remains broad, perhaps even including Charlton Heston and the NRA: ‘‘Laws that prohibit the carrying of arms . disarm only those who are not inclined or determined to commit crimes. And all the while, those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws and the most important of the codes, how will they respect even the minor or purely arbitrary laws? These they can break more easily and with impunity, and which, precisely obeyed, are those laws that would take away personal liberty—so dear to man, so