THE VERB DETER WAS coined in the English language in the 16th century from the Latin deterreo (to frighten) and first applied systematically in 18th- and 19th-century criminological texts. During the 1850s, the English criminologist T.B.L. Baker invented the noun form deterrence to capture an idea about the effects of actual and potential punishment on criminal thought and behavior. Early criminologists believed that criminals who possessed what the utilitarian philosopher (and early deterrence theorist) Jeremy Bentham called “rational agency” were susceptible to the fear of punishment. Modern criminologists argued that punishments such as prison sentences should not be seen as they had been in an earlier age: as acts of moral retribution or as efforts to reform the criminal. Punishments should be seen as “deterrents”: rational tools to prevent crime by warning would-be criminals about what to expect for committing similar infractions. As one criminological textbook explained in 1912, the “theory of deterrence” prescribed punishment “not because wrong has been done but in order that wrong may not be done.”
Supporters of criminological deterrence theory endorsed two key ideas that had been introduced in the 18th century by the Milanese Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria. Beccaria had argued for “proportion between crimes and punishments” — the idea that the punishment should fit the crime. He also argued that the efficacy of deterrence depended more on the speed and certainty of punishment than the severity of punishment. According to one deterrence theorist writing in 1924, “There is no relation between the severity of punishment and the amount of deterrence.” That writer performed an increasingly common rhetorical move among 20th-century criminologists, reifying deterrence into a scientific object and a kind of substance that could exist in greater or lesser quantities.
The theory was not universally accepted among criminologists. Detractors doubted that criminals were guided by utilitarian cost-benefit calculations. A rival theory, developed in the 19th century, viewed criminality as a biological disease or deviant psychological condition. In 1938, one skeptic suggested that the “complicated mental performance” required by the theory was undermined by “pathological stages of fearlessness.” A “born rebel … deters his opponents by being untouched by any kinds of deterrence.” A character in Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, a 1930 novel, put it this way: “Too much of one gland, too little of another, and you get your murderer, your thief, your habitual criminal.”
Thinkers transported the terms deter and deterrent to the field of international relations after the First World War. Aware of these terms’ criminological origins, they built their proposals on a foundational “domestic analogy,” originally explored by Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius, which compared the international realm to a “society of states.” Thus interwar advocates of the League of Nations called for an “international police force” of bomber aircraft. As Lord Davies put it in 1930, the police force would engage in “deterring the would-be aggressor from the crime of war.”