Chapter 2-history

Question 0

Secular law

Answer 0

The law of the civil society, as distinguished from church law.

Question 1

Lex talionis

Answer 1

Law of retaliation-the principle that punishment should correspond in degree and kind to the defense (“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”).

Question 2

Wergild

Answer 2

“Man money”-money paid to relatives of a murdered person or to the victim of a crime to compensate them and to prevent a blood feud

Question 3

Benefit of clergy

Answer 3

The right to be tried in an ecclesiastical court, where punishments where less severe than those meted out by civil courts, given the religious focus on penance and salvation.

Question 4

House of corrections

Answer 4

Definition facility that combined the major elements of a workhouse, poorhouse, and penal industry by both disciplining inmates and setting them to work.

Question 5

Transportation

Answer 5

The practice of transplanting offenders from the community to another region or land, often a penal colony.

Question 6

Corporal punishment

Answer 6

Punishment inflicted on the offender’s body with whips or other devices that cause pain

Question 7

Hulks

Answer 7

Abandoned ships that the English converted to hold convicts during a period of prison crowding between 1776 and 1790.

Question 8

The enlightenment, or the age of reason

Answer 8

The 1700’s in England and France, when concepts of liberalism, rationality, equality, and individuals dominates social and political thinking.

Question 9

Classic criminology

Answer 9

A school of criminology that views behavior as stemming from free will, that demands responsibility and accountability if all perpetrators, and that stresses the need for punishments severe enough to deter others.

Question 10

Cesare Beccaria ( 1738-1784)

Answer 10

Italian scholar who applied the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment to the criminal justice system.

Question 11

Utilitarianism

Answer 11

The doctrine that the aim of all action should be the greatest possible balance of pleasure over pain, hence the belief that a punishment inflicted on an offender must achieve enough good to outweigh the pain inflicted.

Question 12

Jeremy Bentham ( 1748-1832)

Answer 12

English advocate of utilitarianism prison management and discipline. Argued for the treatment and reform o prisoners.

Question 13

John Howard ( 1726-1790)

Answer 13

English prison reformer whose book The State of Prisons in England and Wales contributed greatly to the passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779 by the House of Commons