" This harkens back to the eighteenth-century philosopher and reformer Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 work On Crimes and Punishments—a high-water mark of the Italian Enlightenment—launched the movement to apply rational principles to criminal reform, such as adjusting the punishments to fit the crimes (proportionality) instead of, as was the custom of the day, the death penalty for such offenses as poaching, counterfeiting, theft, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, horse theft, being in the company of Gypsies, and two hundred other crimes and misdemeanors. "

― Michael Shermer , The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom