Cesare Beccaria publishes a brief but celebrated treatise On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, with the encouragement of Pietro Verri.

Some background information had been provided by Pietro, who is in the process of authoring a text on the history of torture, and Alessandro Verri is an official at a Milan prison who has firsthand experience of the prison's appalling conditions.

In this essay, Beccaria reflects the convictions of his friends in the Il Caffè (Coffee House) group, who seek to cause reform through Enlightenment discourse.

Beccaria's treatise marks the high point of the Milan Enlightenment.

In it, Beccaria puts forth some of the first modern arguments against the death penalty.

His treatise is also the first full work of penology, advocating reform of the criminal law system.

The book is the first full-scale work to tackle criminal reform and to suggest that criminal justice should conform to rational principles.

It is a less theoretical work than the writings of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and other comparable thinkers, and as much a work of advocacy as of theory.

The brief work relentlessly protests against torture to obtain confessions, secret accusations, the arbitrary discretionary power of judges, the inconsistency and inequality of sentencing, using personal connections to get a lighter sentence, and the use of capital punishment for serious and even minor offenses.

Beccaria was born in Milan on March 15, 1738, to the Marchese Gian Beccaria Bonesana, an aristocrat of moderate well-being from the Austrian Habsburg Empire.

Beccaria had received his early education in the Jesuit college at Parma.

Subsequently, he graduated in law from the University of Pavia in 1758.

At first he showed a great aptitude for mathematics, but studying Montesquieu (1689–1755) had redirected his attention towards economics.

In 1762 his first publication, a tract on the disorder of the currency in the Milanese states, included a proposal for its remedy.

In his mid-twenties, Beccaria has become close friends with Pietro and Alessandro Verri, two brothers who with a number of other young men from the Milan aristocracy, form a literary society named "L'Accademia dei pugni" (the Academy of Fists), a playful name that makes fun of the stuffy academies that proliferate in Italy and also hints that relaxed conversations that took place in there sometimes end in affrays.

Much of its discussion focuses on reforming the criminal justice system.

Through this group Beccaria has become acquainted with French and British political philosophers, such as Hobbes, Diderot, Helvétius, Montesquieu, and Hume.

He is particularly influenced by Helvétius.