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This course will ask how police, prosecutors, and prisons should operate in an open, democratic society, and what opportunities and challenges democracy creates for making those institutions fair, effective, and humane. Our entry point will be Cesare Beccaria's 1764 treatise, Of Crimes and Punishments, which linked criminal justice reform with the struggle against despotism. Beccaria was a key figure in the Italian Enlightenment, and his treatise laid the foundation for virtually all subsequent efforts at criminal justice reform, in the United States as well as in Europe. Beccaria's ideas heavily influenced the American Revolutionaries, found expression in the Bill of Rights, and continue to shape discussions of policing and punishment today. We will read Beccaria's treatise, as well as secondary materials placing him in historical context and tracing his influence on the reform of criminal justice institutions in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We will also examine a series of contemporary debates about policing, prosecution, and punishment, including calls for prison abolition and for defunding the police, and we will ask what light Beccaria's ideas can throw on those debates. We will consider, too, the criminal-justice dimensions of the recent rise of populism and nativism, both in the United States and in Europe, and the increasing overlap between debates about crime and debates about immigration. Studying Beccaria will provide a window into the Italian Enlightenment, and tracing his influence will help us place modern debates about mass incarceration, police violence, and prosecutorial discretion in historical perspective. We may take field trips to the sites of former prisons in Florence and to Milan, where Beccaria lived and worked.