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Cesare Beccaria and White-Collar Crimes’ Public Harm

A Study in Italian Systemic Corruption

  • Chapter
International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime

Abstract

As the great Italian Enlightenment thinker Cesare Beccaria put it, “The true measure of crimes is … the harm done to society.”1 For Beccaria, a humanitarian legal reformer and the forerunner of the classical school of criminological thought, law should be employed only to control behavior that is harmful to society, and to punish only insofar as the punishment is proportionate to the harm done. Beccaria observed that “they were in error who believed that the true measure of crimes is to be found in the intention of the person who commits them.”2

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Gabrio Forti (Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology)

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  1. Gabrio Forti
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  2. Arianna Visconti
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, Law and Society School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697-7080, USA

    Henry N. Pontell  & Gilbert Geis  & 

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Forti, G., Visconti, A. (2007). Cesare Beccaria and White-Collar Crimes’ Public Harm. In: Pontell, H.N., Geis, G. (eds) International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34111-8_24

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