Crime and punishment: Europe and Serbia in the 19th century

Abstract

In 19th-century Europe, new insights and new demands placed upon the state caused significant changes in the understanding of punishments and penalisations. Retributive justice, which is based on pure retaliation for the offence without any other purpose, was replaced by utilitarianism. The understanding that punishment should be executed for a specific purpose and primarily to protect society, serving as a deterrence, had become the basis of the contemporary approach to punishments and penalisations. The reception of these ideas and their transforming into practical solutions was neither easy, fast, or gradual. The cultures of the 19th century Europe were far from uniform, neither in the economic nor in the spiritual and cultural sense. These principles continued to gain ground throughout the 19th-century Europe, eventually becoming universally accepted today.